With input from faculty collaborator and religious studies expert Randy Sparks, E. Oscar Maynard created an ongoing community-based art project that uses the idea of Tent Revivals to explore the ways we stray from our own power, and the ways we go dormant and then come back to life, or revive. Just as Evangelical congregants are asked to handle snakes to test their faith, many of us are asked to hold poisons close to our bodies as a measure of our faith in various ideas and people. Through interviews, listening, and portraiture, Oscar is helping people to tell the stories of the poisons they are asked to hold to prove their faith.

E. Oscar Maynard has a self-designed B.A. in Visual Art, Psychology, and Gender Studies from Antioch College and a MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in Printmaking. Their work has been shown at Somarts, Mission Cultural Center, and in a number of the National Queer Arts Festival shows. In their spare time they nerd out about gender, feed wild animals in local parks, carve gourd luminaries, and make new things from the Southern Living magazine recipes section.

“My faculty collaborator was so very supportive. The reading recommendations he made changed how I thought about Revivals, their history, the radical undertones I never knew they had and who the participants were.” – E. Oscar Maynard

“I was excited to collaborate with Oscar Maynard, a wonderfully talented artist with Southern roots, whose work explored the complexities surrounding Southern religion, gender, race and sexuality […] Such an opportunity would never have come my way without Studio in the Woods and your Flint and Steel initiative — it’s a creative, dynamic, and rewarding program.” – Randy Sparks