Making the Kingdom Visible

August 26 – October 14, 2026

Bryn Gillette

Panel Discussion with President Michael Hammond
Wednesday, September 23, 2026 | 4:30-5:30 p.m.
Chairs Room, Ken Olsen Science Center

Opening Reception and Gallery Talk
Saturday, September 26, 2026 | 4:00-6:00 p.m.
Barrington Center for the Arts

The Plower; 2010; 32x48 in. Oil on Canvas

About the Exhibition

What Bible story can we read without using our imagination to recreate, what promise of Scripture can we imagine without faith? What description of Heaven can we access without creative hope?

I spent my childhood and college education at Gordon developing my visual vocabulary so I could be sufficiently articulate to express the worlds I carried in my own head. As an artist who now describes my calling as “making the Kingdom visible,” it is such a privilege to be able to visualize things of the Spirit and invite others into a world unseen by human eyes. 

The paintings assembled in this show represent a cross section of my work since graduating from Gordon in 2001. I am bringing back the harvest, metaphorically and literally, after twenty-five years of broken and beautiful attempts at plowing, sowing, tending, and harvesting in the field of my artistic assignments. Yet all of the greatest elements of my life have been gifts of grace, not wages of work: my wife Kirsten and four children, my mental health journey, the invitation to begin painting live, my serendipitous connection to Haiti and the unfolding of the Beyond The Ruins series, my introduction to the Lausanne Movement (Billy Graham’s evangelical network, whose vision is to see “the whole church bring the whole gospel to the whole world”) and my more than twelve years of artistic residency with them; and my two miraculous teaching opportunities. All gifts of grace. 

My prayer is that this show displays the goodness of God to an all-too-human artist and awakens your heart to the scope of God’s Kingdom swirling, unseen, all around us through these glimpses made visible. 

About the Artist

Bryn Gillette is an artistic ambassador of Jesus who stewards his gifts to make the Kingdom of God visible. Married with four children, he is a full-time teacher of art and art history at Charlotte Christian School in North Carolina and maintains a studio art practice of painting, writing, and speaking. Bryn earned his undergraduate degree from Gordon College and holds an MFA in painting from Western Connecticut State University. He is regularly invited to paint and speak during live events, capturing real-time expressions of the Holy Spirit as a “visual scribe." His studio commissions are held in private and corporate collections around the world.  He is a co-founder of the non-profit TeamOne:27, a ministry supporting orphans in Haiti, and, since 2014, has also served as an artist-in-residence for the Lausanne Movement.

Lausanne Movement Pillar 2: Disciple-Making Churches for Every People and Place; 2017; 32x20 in. Acrylic on Panel