Artists + scholars
Chalk & Pen™
Chalk & Pen™ brings artists and professionals into conversation around mediumship and cultural production. What is mediumship? It is the art and office of being both creator and conduit.
Explore Chalk & Pen
Black Commune
Chalk & Pen
A retreat for Black scholars in theology and religion — thinking with Black cultural production and mediumship, and writing until the work is done.
March 7–11 · Registration opens October 1
Omni Bedford Springs Resort & Spa, Bedford Springs, PA
One method, distinct expressions
COMMUNE
COMMUNE creates cohort-based professional development experiences through art, contemplative spirituality, and vocational discernment. Our gatherings invite participants to encounter, respond, and reflect through artistic practice, ekphrasis, and intentional community.
Place + contemplation
Petit Marronage+ ~ The Black Commune
Petit Marronage+ is informed by resistance practices of Africans in sixteenth-century Panama, including short-term flight used to seek relief and greater autonomy. The contemporary expression convenes professionals in natural environments for contemplative retreat, sensory grounding, sustained creative work, and vocational reflection.
Explore Petit Marronage+ ~ The Black CommuneEncounter
Tactile engagement with artistic mediums
Respond
Ekphrastic response through image, language, and form
Reflect
Vocational discernment in intentional community
Thematic accent
Black Cultural Production & Mediumship
What does it mean to be a medium — a conduit, a channel, a vessel — in Black religious life and in Black art? Chalk & Pen gathers scholars who take altars, canvases, hymnals, turntables, and quilts as serious theological archives.
For five days in the Allegheny mountains, the week is arranged around the making itself: studio time beside writing time, spirit-work beside scholarship, and a commune of readers who know the stakes of the work you carry.
Artists in Residence
Painters, poets, and sound artists work alongside scholars all week, treating Black cultural production as theological argument in its own right.
Intensive Writing Blocks
Three protected hours each morning and two each afternoon. No panels, no service work — only the chalk, the pen, and the page.
Optional Feedback Sessions
Small, opt-in circles with senior readers and artists in residence for chapters, articles, grant narratives, and creative manuscripts.
“Brush to Pen” Ekphrastic Writing Sessions
In these sessions, scholars sit with the work of Harmonia Rosales — Baroque tableaux where Black divinity, gold leaf, and violet drapery reimagine the sacred. We move from looking to language: each brushstroke becomes a prompt, each figure a question for the page.
Facilitated by Dr. Michele E. Watkins and Dr. Leonard C. McKinnis, III, these circles invite you to write what the image demands — prose that argues, remembers, and conjures in equal measure.
- · Guided viewing of selected Rosales prints
- · Generative prompts bridging image, theology, and memoir
- · Optional share-back with the cohort
What participants receive
A copy of Chronicles of Ori
Every participant will receive and use their own copy of Harmonia Rosales’s Chronicles of Ori during the “Brush to Pen” writing sessions.
The book becomes our shared text: a visual archive we read, argue with, and translate into prose.
View publicationsThe venue
Omni Bedford Springs
A 2,200-acre historic mountain resort in the Cumberland Valley: colonnaded porches, mineral springs, quiet libraries, and eight miles of wooded trails. Rooms, meals, and the springs-fed spa sit steps from every writing room.
- · Private writing suites and reading parlors reserved for the cohort
- · Historic Springs Eternal Spa and indoor mineral pool
- · Farm-to-table dining, evening fires, and mountain trails
Registration opens October 1
The retreat fee is $3,500 and includes all workshops, studio access, cohort materials, and daily snacks, meals, and beverages. Lodging at the Omni is booked separately at our negotiated cohort rate. A limited number of full and partial fellowships are available for junior, contingent, and independent scholars.
Members of the Society for the Study of Black Religion should ask about their special discounted rate.