If you’re unfamiliar with Hope Newman Kemp, we’re delighted to introduce you. Hope was invited to join the Renew the Arts board in 2025 and we’re grateful for her partnership and insight as a music artist. Learn a bit about her story through this conversation . . .
Tell me about you! What’s your background and how did you first connect with Renew the Arts?
“I am a child of the Baptist South, yet brought up immersed in Jesus Folk 70’s culture inside of a blended family consisting of my mother and brother, step father and two step sisters. The free spirited nature of this unconventional Christian home culture fueled my unrelenting appetite for creativity, symbolic beauty, and artistic expression; my own formed into a piano driven songwriter and psalmist.
While in high school I studied classical piano, sang with a jazz big band, but also traveled with an evangelistic music group that utilized racial unity as the tool for preaching the Gospel of Jesus. In college I began learning recording arts working as a jingle singer. My goal was to have a career in the arts, but I met a cute Italian ROTC cadet, and my future took a 90 degree turn. We’ve been married now for 42 years, have 4 married children and 11 grandchildren.”
“Along the way, throughout Army moves, homeschooling, and eventually settling back on my family’s 100 acre wood, I have endeavored where I could to create artistic beauty from the chaos of our noisy life, including self-producing a few of my own recordings. This has meant a nonconventional (again) pursuit of musical expression, which has often caused great wrestling in my spirit for artistic identity, most particularly in my empty nest years. As The Lord would have it, He directed me to a Renew the Arts Podcast series on the history of art and it became a gateway out of my existential crises. After several lengthy and helpful conversations with Michael Minkoff (resulting in a friendship between our families), he invited me to join the Board of Renew the Arts and help serve in that capacity.”
Tell us about the role of art in your life, perhaps one of your favorite pieces, and how it may have affected you.
“Our home was an eclectic collection of art from Salvador Dali to Thomas Kincaid to walls embroidered by my grandmother’s needlepoint, and dinners made from Mama’s scratch biscuits and home canned greens—all set to a background music embracing Dave Brubeck, The Kingston Trio, Handel’s Messiah, or The 5th Dimension. I thought all households were like ours. It wasn’t until much later, during our three-year Army obligation in Europe where a whole new world of art was opened to me. Now as an adult, when asked this question my first response is Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Wanderer Above a Sea of Mist”. The moment I came in view of it I felt had always known it. The melancholy nature of this painting is something I think I will love for my entire life.”
Why are you passionate about the mission of Renew the Arts: “Cultivating Christian communities in and through the arts by inspiring arts partnership and supporting artists”?
“My husband was raised Roman Catholic. This Christian faith tradition was the only one I wasn’t exposed to until meeting him. As a couple we practice a non-denominational tradition and I’ve noticed a stark distinction in the value of sacred space aesthetic between the two. While I do not believe that an intentional relationship between church and art is at all salvific, I do respect how architectural and design decisions help the human spirit lift from its base natural mires into more elevated thoughts and ideas about God, and the people and tasks of our realm.”
What’s a good example highlighting the importance of this mission?
“My favorite story so far is one far too stereotypical: There was a large mega church that built a brand new large and encompassing fellowship area as part of its greater campus. One of the church’s members was a well known painter. The building committee reached out to the painter to ask for his help—one would think this would perhaps be in requesting artwork at a reduced rate (or even for free), but the request was much more clumsy than that: they asked for his help in physically installing artwork that was mass-produced from a blue box store!
The painter, to his credit, helped the committee understand how insulting their request was. They were actually trying to include him without wanting to burden him for his own art. This kind of blunder is one that I see happening on smaller levels in most churches today and in my opinion needs to be spoken of [more].”
Share one of the current organizational challenges or opportunities at Renew the Arts right now.
“There seems to be a prevailing idea that if one has an artist in their midst that said artist will show and tell, when in reality most [artists] are more confused about where and how they (and their work) fits inside the greater scheme of the Church. Combine this with our blue box fast-and-easy post-modern unintentional culture . . . and we get a storm of the artistic dullards. It’s not art for art’s sake that the Church needs (although Ryken’s essay on the subject ought be required reading for every seminary student), yet we are a people of longing, grief, and joy and the artist is most helpful, and courageous, in blazing a trail for the Church, helping the people of God better express them and live in the nearness of His presence. He is the ultimate Creator, and we (as Andrew Peterson reminds us of J.R.R. Tolkien’s word) are made in His image as “subcreators.” I guarantee there are artists in every church that have been quietly sitting and probably know how they could best integrate beauty into the space; they just need the patient invitation.”
[Take a listen to this episode of the Renew the Arts Podcast: Top 5 Things Churches Should Communicate to Their Artists ]
Thank you for serving on the Renew the Arts board. Is there anything else you’d like to share, Hope?
I am very happy to be a part of this group. Coming on board has been a direct answer to fervent prayer regarding my own artistic passions . . . I hope to be of good service.
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Check out the 2025 Annual Report, which features both of Renew the Arts newest board members, Jonathan Warner and Hope Newman Kemp.