This week's Lenten art offering from the Sacred Art Pilgrim collection was created by an assemblage artist in Alabama who has dedicated her life to making crosses. Catherine Partain was seeking a new beginning after a difficult divorce, when she awoke one night in 2008, feeling she had been called to use her artistic talent to create crosses. She assembled her first piece from broken bits of furniture. Since then, the Alabama artist has learned how to weld and has made over 500 crosses out of everything from stained glass shards and cable wire to metal bench legs and ornamental ironwork. Partain only uses found objects in her pieces. She believes she makes art from scrap in the same way God finds beauty in "the rusted out, useless junk we hold inside us." The Author of Salvation Cross, now on view in the image gallery of the Crosses and Crucifixes page in the Schools of Sacred Art section has special meaning for Partain. She assembled it from scrap she salvaged from her grandparent's home, destroyed in the April 2011 outbreak of tornadoes across the American South. (John Kohan)