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Carl Dixon, a self-taught artist from Mississippi, considers his mixed-media, sculpted wood paintings to be works of “testimony art,” sharing the great narratives of the Bible, significant moments from the African American experience, and his life story and religious faith. These themes all come together in his epic-sized, single-panel triptych depicting journeys of liberation. To the left in the carved painting, Moses leads the children of Israel through the Red Sea, miraculously parted to allow their escape from Egypt.

During the civil war in Syria, when many left the country to escape violence and hunger, Dutch Jesuit priest Frans van der Lugt insisted on remaining in the city of Hom, where he ministered to the disabled and to sought to foster harmony between Muslims and Christians. After a Catholic church was bombed, Father Frans asked the local imam to come to mass and read from the Qur’an. Soon thereafter, in April 2014, Father Frans was murdered. Jordan Denari Duffner uses the form of an icon to pay homage to him.

Scott Hocking is equal parts scavenger, spelunker, and archaeologist. At the nadir of Detroit’s lean years, the artist began scrambling over walls and scuttling under security fences into abandoned factories in order to create mysterious, primal shapes out of refuse, using materials from concrete to polystyrene. In some instances, these forms remain in place, like ancient rune stones; others have gradually collapsed or been bulldozed by developers, leaving little trace.