Meinrad Craighead (1936–2019) was an artist, scholar, and visionary, influential in the field of woman-centered religious art. Her work explores the human relationship to the Divine, particularly feminine images of God
Craighead moved to the Southwest after graduating from the University of Wisconsin to accept a teaching job in the art department at the College of St. Joseph on the Rio Grande in Albuquerque. Here, she taught classes, began printing gesso relief prints, and explored Native American traditions in the Southwest.
"Her approach to her work, as a sacred calling, as a communication with the many spirits she was in contact with, is an inspiration.
She wrote:
My personal vision of God the Mother, incarnated in my mother and her mother, gave me, from childhood, the clearest certainty of woman as the truer image of Divine Spirit. Because she was a force living within me, she was more real, more powerful than the remote Fathergod I was educated to have faith in. I believed in her because I experienced her.…
I draw and pain from my own myth of personal origin. Each painting I make begins from some deep source where my mother and and grandmother, and all my fore-mothers, still live; it is as if the line moving from pen or brush coils back to the original Matrix. Sometimes I feel like a cauldron of ripening images where memories turn into faces and emerge from my vessel. So my creative life is itself an image of God the Mother and her unbroken story of emergence in our lives. "
