Ceramic artist Aaron Tennessee Benson opens the museum’s 2018 calendar year on January 21 with an exhibition, “Veiled”. 

The works illustrate the difficulty people have believing what they cannot see and challenges viewers to think beyond the obvious. 

“My work stems a lot from understanding the eternal,” he said. “Being a Christian, I grapple with understanding eternity and staking my entire life on this belief I have in my faith. I don’t have all the answers and don’t believe I’ll ever have all the answers. I have to create work with some of the struggles I have with my faith. Struggles in a good sense: developing my faith as my own and not my parents’ faith or my friends’ faith and trying to understand the idea of eternity.”

Benson said that while his work is spiritual in nature, it’s not trying to make a specific political statement.

“There’s no hidden agenda,” he said. “Just a 30-year-old man who has believed in following Christ for 20-something years and still not completely understanding it all and wrestling with it, and working it out, and making it my own.”