"Gate, Gate, Para Gate" from the "Blue Heaped upon Blue" series

Saigyo Terrance Keenan is an artist, writer, poet, and Zen Buddhist priest who lived in Syracuse for many years, training with Shinge Roshi at the Zen Center of Syracuse and working as rare books librarian at Syracuse University’s Bird Library.  He was greatly influenced by the work of his grandfather, Peter Keenan, a New Hope Modernist who said, “Art is a way to talk to God.” Saigyo has exhibited at Monkton Community Arts Gallery in Maryland and the Towson Art Collective, among other venues. In 2008 he was juror for the Johns Hopkins University-sponsored international traveling exhibition “Art and Addiction.” His books include poetry collections, a memoir, St. Nadie in Winter, an archival account of a Central New York family If Our Lives Be Spared, and the novel Master of Nothing.