History of The Phoenix Prize
The Phoenix Prize for spiritual art arose from the winding up of the Christian Media Association ACT Inc., an incorporated body in the Australian Capital Territory, that for some 30 years had been a forum for the Christian church organisations of the ACT Churches Council to provide a single voice in the media, principally to provide video advertisements on local, commercial television channels that were played in the nature of public service announcement.
In 2003, the committee of the Christian Media Association ACT Inc. realised that its goals and purposes were generally being served by its constituent organisations, and that free-to-air television was becoming difficult to source and fund. Accordingly, the committee decided to use its remaining funds to establish an ongoing cultural prize for artists, managed by the ANU. The basis for funding was that the prize could be funded for some four years during which the ANU would seek additional donations to create what should be, in effect, a perpetual prize. It is intended to be complementary to the Blake Prize for Religious Art.
Aside from the name, the Phoenix Prize for spiritual art denoting in part that "the prize rises from the ashes of the donating organisation", it also incorporates that spirituality is to be the point of the art; what point is being made by the artists is left to them. It should also be noted that the Christian Media Association ACT Inc. did not proscribe any art medium or manifestation of spirituality and, indeed, the inaugural competition contained works of painting, sculpture, installation, and weaving, depicting motifs clearly incorporating from Christianity, tarot, homosexuality, and the spirituality of Australian Aborigines.
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