This exhibit celebrates the experience of modern pilgrims from the United States and Canada who set out to retrace the paths to Santiago de Compostela on its Camino francés from Roncesvalles on the French border, down the slopes of the western Pyrenees, and through the fertile vineyards of La Rioja. Once in Castilla, the pilgrim treks from Burgos across the high tablelands and their endless fields of wheat where a string of ancient settlements bear the common surname “de Campos”.
The city of León offers its plazas and cathedral as sites of welcome to modern pilgrims before they press on over the Montes de León, through the Valley of the Bierzo with its fruit orchards, and up the flanks of Galicia’s first gentle mountains. O Cebreiro is Galicia’s first hamlet, often wind swept and fog bound but the travelers know that Santiago lies only days ahead. The final hillsides and eucalyptus groves swim past in a trance. The towers of the Cathedral are soon in sight, flanked by a city that knows when to celebrate, when to keep its own counsel and pray.
Like pilgrims of every age, contemporary pilgrims seek to express their sense of wonder at both the monuments and the mundane beauties they encounter, many of the structures now restored to their former glory and rededicated to their former purpose of hospitality to travelers. And they also seek to communicate in art something of their inner pilgrimage by contributing images of landscapes made sacred by the questing of untold millions who wandered on the same routes and under the same sky. These photographs, sketches and paintings are the record of travel that transformed them, gave them new vistas and new eyes to see them with.
While the trajectory is geographical, many of these images resonate with specific themes well known to those who have made any portion of the journey to the shrine of St. James. These motifs embrace notions of the steps, stops, friends, memories that mark one’s passage.
The steps measure a journey whose labors are often solitary but rewarded with a faithful succession of way markers, paths and roadside rest points. The stops are familiar to every pilgrim, whether they be the lacy cloister of Nájera, or Estella’s lofty San Pedro de la Rúa. A different sort of pause is made for rest or to tend to one’s battered feet and muscles, mostly in the company of companions of the road who generously lend their aid and become friends, who are sometimes just characters, sometimes spiritual guides, and with surprising regularity both. Spanish citizens make up a good part of this category.
One of the most significant aspects of the Camino is, of course, faith and the inner journey that forms the most lasting legacy of the walker’s experience. This vision may be etched in the mind as the white light of a memorable dawn, a humble way marker that brought sudden relief at not being lost after all, the peasant practicality of the first Galician hórreo, and the starkly fulfilling Cruz de Hierro.
The journey to Santiago de Compostela, despite its solitary nature, has always been one of rhythms. The soft churning of footfalls, the cadence of the wind, the alternation of eloquent open country by day with holy chanting and merry conversation by night become the yardsticks of time for the wandering pilgrim. The very blankness of the countryside – in Spain one speaks of the meseta as a terrain where “the sky is your landscape” – invites the modern pilgrim as much as his or her medieval predecessors to look inward.
The images in this exhibition on Sacred Steps capture on film and canvas the visions our contributing artists gathered along their own pilgrimages in Spain.
