NEW ALBUM: By Babylon’s River by the Pharaoh Sisters: A folk band from the foothills of North Carolina, the Pharaoh Sisters [previously] are Austin Pfeiffer, Jared Meyer, Kevin Beck, and John Daniel Ray. On September 13 they released their second album, By Babylon’s River, unveiling a new genre they call “saloon Christian.” The title track is a western waltz adaptation of Psalm 137. Also included on the album are a version of Psalm 81 (“Sing, Oh Sing”); bluegrass arrangements of the gospel standards “Leave It There” and “Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand”; retunes of the hymns “All Things Bright and Beautiful” by Cecil Frances Alexander and “’Tis Finished” by Charles Wesley; a cheeky take on the story of Samson, and more.
I was introduced to Hurt over a decade ago through his recording of the African American spiritual “I Shall Not Be Moved,” based on Psalm 1. The songs he sang were a mix of sacred and secular.
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ARTISTS’ PROFILE: “Sunny Taylor / Jack Baumgartner,”Artful, season 3, episode 6: The BYUtv docuseries Artful, which is available to watch freely online, profiles a variety of artists of faith—many of them Latter-day Saints, but some (non-LDS) Christian or Jewish.
The first half of episode 6, season 3, highlights the work of Sunny Taylor, who lives in Wilton, Maine, and engages with painting’s geometric tradition. She values process over product and wants viewers to observe the surface and textures of her paintings, built up through meticulous layering techniques that involve scraping and grinding. She sees beauty in imperfection, and sorrow and joy as bound up together. Follow her on Instagram @sunnytaylorart.
Sunny Taylor (American, 1979–) Connections, 2024. Acrylic on panel, 24 × 12 in. [for sale] [artist’s statement]
Beginning at the 13:38 time stamp, the second half is on multidisciplinary artist Jack Baumgartner of Kansas. Baumgartner, who has a Presbyterian background, is a printmaker, painter, farmer, woodworker, puppeteer, and musician. He raises sheep, goats, and chickens, builds furniture, plays the banjo, and cohosts the podcast The Color of Dust with two poet friends, “exploring the seen and unseen in the soil of art and agriculture.” He is also a husband and a father of five. I first learned about Baumgartner through an Image journal profile; and Plough published an article about him in 2018. I really enjoyed this twelve-minute video segment that shows him at work and at play in and around his home—especially his puppet theater performance of The Two Deaths of John Beartrist Laceroot! Follow him on Instagram @baumwerkj.
Jack Baumgartner (American, 1976–), Go On, Adam, Breathe, 2023. Linocut, 14 × 18 in. [for sale]
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PODCAST EPISODE: “Grief and Poetry, with guest Kim Langley,”Faith and Imagination, October 4, 2021: Kim Langley is a certified spiritual director and retreat leader from Ohio; she is also the founder of WordSPA (acronym for “Spirituality Poetry Appreciation”) and author of Send My Roots Rain: A Companion on the Grief Journey (Paraclete, 2019), a compilation of sixty poems interwoven with narrative and commentary, in preparation for which she interviewed some three dozen chaplains, pastors, grief counselors, hospice workers, funeral directors, and bereaved people. She wrote the book after the death of her parents. “I found such comfort in the poems,” she writes, “written by a host of people just like us, picking up their pain, juggling it awkwardly in their arms at first—or maybe for a long time—then gradually finding the resilience to carry it, to know when and how to put it down, when to pick it up, and how to develop strong muscles for the long haul. They helped me carry my pain, and I think they will help you to survive, and maybe even thrive a little.” In this podcast episode, she and the host read and discuss four poems from the book: “Let Evening Come” and “Otherwise” by Jane Kenyon, “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, and “Stillbirth” by Laure-Anne Bosselaar.
Launched in 2020, Faith and Imagination [previously] is the podcast of the BYU Humanities Center, hosted by founding director Matthew Wickman. It features interviews with a range of writers, scholars, clergy, and others. View the full archive at https://humanitiescenter.byu.edu/podcast/. And in addition to the Langley episode, let me turn your attention to an excellent recent release with an author I’ve mentioned before: “On Deepening Our Religious Experience: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church, with Abram Van Engen.” You may have heard Van Engen discuss his new book elsewhere, but this interview brings some great insights to the fore.
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CREATIVE COLLABORATION: Ordinary Saints, a project by artist Bruce Herman, poet Malcolm Guite, and composer J.A.C. Redford: When Bruce Herman’s parents died unexpectedly in 2009, three months apart, painting their portraits was a key way in which he moved through his grief. Poet Malcolm Guite saw Herman’s portrait of his father exhibited at a Christians in the Visual Arts conference in 2011 and, struck by its sheer sense of presence, wrote a sonnet about it. This act of ekphrasis then developed into a three-way collaboration when their mutual friend J.A.C. Redford, a composer, responded by setting Guite’s poem to music.
Bruce Herman (American, 1953–), Portrait of the Artist’s Father: William C. Herman, 2010. Oil and alkyd on wood, 30 5/8 × 51 in. Collection of the artist.
The basis of Ordinary Saints is a series of portraits Herman painted of family and friends throughout the 2010s, which spawned a series of poems by Guite, which in turn spawned a suite of instrumental music and a song cycle by Redford. The first public presentation of the multidisciplinary project was at a Laity Lodge retreat in the Texas Hill Country on October 26–28, 2018, and it has since traveled to Nashville and Oxford.
The project attempts “to render . . . a glimpse of the glory of our mortal faces when turned toward God . . . faces that point toward the one Face we all must seek,” Herman says. Or, as Guite puts it: “to explore what it means to be truly face to face with one another, how we might discern the image of God in our fellow human beings, and how that discernment might ready us for the time when, as we are promised, we will no longer see ‘through a glass darkly’ but really see God and one another face to face in the all-revealing, and all-healing light of Heaven.”
Here is the title poem, followed by Redford’s title composition for voice, piano, cello, and clarinet:
Ordinary Saints
by Malcolm Guite
The ordinary saints, the ones we know, Our too-familiar family and friends, When shall we see them? Who can truly show Whilst still rough-hewn, the God who shapes our ends? Who will unveil the presence, glimpse the gold That is and always was our common ground, Stretch out a finger, feel, along the fold To find the flaw, to touch and search that wound From which the light we never noticed fell Into our lives? Remember how we turned To look at them, and they looked back? That full- Eyed love unselved us, and we turned around, Unready for the wrench and reach of grace. But one day we will see them face to face.
>> “Ordinary Sugar” by Amanda Gunn: Pádraig Ó Tuama reads and comments on this food poem in the July 10, 2023, episode of Poetry Unbound. “How can russet potatoes be made to taste of sugar and caramel? By dedication, love, and craft. Amanda Gunn places her poetry in conversation with the farming and culinary skills of her forebears: women who cultivated land, survival, strength, and family bonds.”
>> “Given”by Anna A. Friedrich: This poem by Anna A. Friedrich is a beautiful tribute to her grandmother, Juanita Powell Alphin, who died this June. Friedrich imagines all the gifts her memama ever gave—jump ropes, stuffed animals, homemade fudge, thrift-store doodads, five-dollar bills, a kitten, a plane ticket, etc.—tumbling out onto the golden streets of heaven, a testimony to her generous, loving spirit.
>> Live On by the Good Shepherd Collective: The fourteen songs on this seventh full-length album by the Good Shepherd Collective are a mix of gospel, pop, and indie covers (Natalie Bergman, Harry Connick Jr., Aaron Frazer, Joni Mitchell, the Alabama Shakes, Celine Dion, Valerie June, Toulouse, Wilder Adkins) and two originals. Here’s “Look Who I Found” by Harry Connick Jr., sung by Charles Jones, followed by “Peace in the Middle” by Dee Wilson, Asaph Alexander Ward, and David Gungor, sung by Wilson, Gungor, and Rebecca McCartney. For more video recordings of songs from the album, see the Good Shepherd New York YouTube channel, which also features weekly digital worship services. Released July 12.
>> Facing Eden by Hope Newman Kemp: I heard Kemp perform at last year’s Square Halo conference and was compelled by her style, spirit, and songwriting. So I’m excited to see that several of the songs she shared live have now been recorded and released on her brand-new album! Produced by Jeremy Casella and tracked with a session band at the storied Watershed Studio in Nashville, Facing Eden leans toward café jazz but also bears influences from the Jesus Folk music of the 1960s that she was immersed in growing up. “Encompassing expansive sonic territory, the record isn’t afraid to wander into blue cocktail hours (‘My Inflatable Heart’), gospel riversides (‘Mercy,’ ‘Come Home,’ ‘Let It Rise’), ballad-style acoustic hymnody (‘Maria’s Song’), and even the free rubato motion of a musical theatre sound (‘Take Them Home’).” Released August 30.
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ARTICLE:“Apache Christ icon controversy sparks debate over Indigenous Catholic faith practices” by Deepa Barath, Associated Press: In 1989, a new icon by the Franciscan artist-friar Robert Lentz was installed behind the altar of St. Joseph Apache Mission church in Mescalero, New Mexico. According to the artist’s statement, the painting shows Christ as a Mescalero holy man, standing on the sacred Sierra Blanca (White Mountains). A sun symbol is painted on his left palm, and in his right hand he holds a deer hoof rattle. A basket at his feet holds an eagle feather, a grass brush, and bags of tobacco and cattail pollen, items used in Native rituals. Behind him flies an eagle, the guide who led the nomadic hunter-gatherer Apaches to their “promised land” of the Tularosa Basin in southern New Mexico some seven hundred years ago. The inscription at the bottom reads, “Bik’egu’inda’n,” Apache for “Giver of Life.” The Greek letters in the upper corners are an abbreviation for “Jesus Christ.”
Br. Robert Lentz (American, 1946–), OFM, Apache Christ, 1989. Egg tempera and gold leaf on gessoed panel, 8 × 4 ft. St. Joseph Apache Mission Church, Mescalero, New Mexico. Photo: Colin Archibald.
Fr. Dave Mercer, a former priest at St. Joseph’s, describes the image and its significance:
When Franciscan Br. Robert Lentz painted his Apache Christ icon, he did so with great care for Apache traditions and sacred customs and with dialogue with tribal spiritual leaders, the medicine men and women. With their approval, he painted Jesus as a medicine man, including symbols and sacred items for which our Apache friends needed no explanation. They understood the message that our Lord Jesus had been with them all along and that he is one of them as he is one with the people of every land.
But on June 26, the church’s then-priest, Father Peter Chudy Sixtus Simeon-Aguinam, who had been installed in December 2023, removed the icon and a smaller painting depicting a sacred Indigenous dancer. Also taken were ceramic chalices and baskets given by the Pueblo community for use during the Eucharist. Neither Father Chudy nor the Diocese of Las Cruces, which oversees the mission, have provided a statement, but in July Father Chudy departed and, due to the demands of the congregation, the icon and other objects were returned. Presumably the removal was due to a fear of syncretism.
I’m not able to address that complicated charge in this roundup format, but I wanted to put this news item out there to show how art so often shapes religious communities—in this case affirming the Apache Christian identity (contrary to the claims of some, the two are not mutually exclusive) and conveying a sense of God-with-us and God-for-us. Click here to watch a five-minute video interview with the artist from 2016, who says the icon of the Apache Christ is an effort to heal the wounds that Christian missionaries inflicted on Native people in the past.
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NEW BOOK: The Bible in Photography: Index, Icon, Tableau, Vision by Sheona Beaumont: Artist and scholar Sheona Beaumont [previously] is a visiting research fellow at King’s College London and cofounder of Visual Theology. In this book published by T&T Clark, she discusses, with critical depth, a range of “photographs that depict or refer to biblical subject matter, asking how the reception of the Bible by photographers and their audiences reveals their imaginative interpretation,” she writes. “I hope to show that, far from being an outdated, idiosyncratic or dead referent, the Bible’s many afterlives in photographs are uniquely qualified to show up the workings of a modern religious imagination” (1).
In preparation for this project, Beaumont comprehensively scoped the representations of biblical characters, scenes, and texts through the whole of photographic history, from Fred Holland Day and Julia Margaret Cameron to Gilbert & George and Bettina Rheims. For the book she chose fifty-five such images and interviewed twenty living photographers. In addition to fine-art photography, she covers documentary photography, advertising photography, propaganda, diableries, and spirit photography.
The Bible in Photography is highly academic; nonscholars will probably find part 1, where the author establishes the conceptional and methodological footing for her inquiry, too dense (it’s in dialogue with Hans-Georg Gadamer, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, and Anthony Thiselton). For me, the highlight of the book is the selection of images and the grappling with the literal and the spiritual—the difficulties of representing historically real persons using contemporary models, and of conveying a “something more” beyond the surface, an element of transcendence. Some of the photographic pieces I’ve never encountered before, such as Corita Kent’s arrangement of journalistic photographs as Stations of the Cross from the Spring 1966 issue of Living Light. There’s much to savor here!
My research interests center on the figure of Christ, a figure that, Beaumont notes, still has cultural currency in fine-art photography. “Even if our predominantly secular culture has largely abandoned its inheritance of a (Christian) hermeneutic tradition, the heritage-infused currents of visual culture in combination with the return of religion in global terms, demands its voice” (225). She encourages us to consider where and how and why Jesus is showing up in the medium of photography.
Left: Lewis Hine (American, 1874–1940), A Madonna of the Tenements, 1904. Gelatin silver print, diameter 10 in. Right: Raphael (Italian, 1483–1520), Madonna of the Chair, 1513–14. Oil on panel, diameter 28 in. Palazzo Pitti, Florence.Adi Nes (Israeli, 1966–), Untitled (Ruth and Naomi), 2006. C-print, 140 × 177 cm.David Mach (Scottish, 1956–), The Money Lenders – Barcelona, 2011. Press print collage, 10 × 18 ft.
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VIDEO: Deer in a Church: This short clip is one of the test scenes filmed on July 23, 2014, at the Église Saint-Eustache (Church of Saint Eustace) in Paris in preparation for a site-specific video installation commissioned for the church from Leonora Hamill, a photographic artist born in Paris and based in London and New York. The church is named after a Roman general who converted from paganism to Christianity during a hunt, after the stag he was pursuing turned to him and a cross appeared between its antlers, and he heard God speak, commanding him to be baptized. Eustace was martyred for his faith by Emperor Trajan in AD 118. His feast day is celebrated on September 20 in the Catholic Church and November 2 in the Orthodox Church.
The magnificent red deer (Cervus elaphus) in the video, a trained stag, is named Chambord. The installation he was filmed for, which was on view from December 4, 2014, to January 18, 2015, is titled Furtherance; a “making of” video can be seen here, and Hamill has posted another test scene on Instagram. Her director of photography for the project was Ghasem Ebrahimian.
From the artist’s website: “Shot on 35mm, the work weaves together traces of everyday activities within the church, unusual architectural points of view and a live stag . . . wandering through the space. Hamill transcribes the collective energy specific to this place of worship by retracing the steps of the church’s various occupants: priests, parishioners, tourists, soup-kitchen volunteers (on duty at the West Entrance every evening during winter) and their ‘guests’. These crossing paths constitute the social essence of the site. Their minimalist and precise choreography merges the human and spiritual sap of St Eustache.”
The footage of the majestic deer inside the majestic seventeenth-century sacred space—looking curiously around the high altar, the soaring candles reminiscent of trees in a forest—is breathtaking! Reminds me of Josh Tiessen’s Streams in the Wastelands painting series. Even nonhuman creatures praise the Creator.
Leonora Hamill (French, 1978–), Furtherance, installation view, St. Eustache Church, Paris, 2014. Two-channel HD projection, color. 35 mm transferred to 2K. Duration: 8 mins, 26 secs. Commissioned by the Rubis Mécénat cultural fund. Photo: Liz Eve.Production still from Furtherance by Leonora Hill
Out of the living word Come flower, serpent and bird.
All things that swim or fly Or go upon the ground, All shapes that breath can cry Into the sinews of sound, That growth can make abound In the river of the eye Till speech is three-ply And the truth triply wound.
Out of the living word Come flower, serpent and bird.
Howard Nemerov (1920–1991) was a major figure in midcentury American poetry, whose Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize. He served as US poet laureate from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990, and he also wrote fiction and essays. “Romantic, realist, comedian, satirist, relentless and indefatigable brooder upon the most ancient mysteries—Nemerov is not to be classified,” Joyce Carol Oates remarked in the New Republic. From an artistic family, Nemerov was the older brother of the photographer Diane Arbus.
The exuberantly decorated Book of Kells is widely agreed to be the most beautiful book ever made. The crown jewel of Celtic art, it is a manuscript copy of the Four Holy Gospels in Latin, with ten surviving full-page illuminations and many more marginal illuminations and decorated initials throughout the other 670 pages—the work of three artists and four scribes.
Most art historians believe the book was created on the Scottish island of Iona by a group of monks sometime around 800. Viking raids at that time forced the monks to flee to the monastery of Kells in Ireland; they were able to save the book, but it was left unfinished.
The most famous page from the Book of Kells is folio 34r, often referred to as the Christi autem or Chi-Rho page.
The Chi-Rho page from the Book of Kells, ca. 800. Trinity College Dublin MS 58, fol. 34r.
The page illuminates the “second beginning” of the Gospel of Matthew, following the genealogy and opening the narrative of the life of Christ: Christi autem generatio (“Now the birth of Christ . . .”) (Matt. 1:18). The anonymous artist represents the Holy Name of Jesus with a monogram, enlarged and embellished, consisting of the Greek letters chi (Χ) (pronounced “kai”), rho (ρ), and iota (ι), the first three letters in the word Χριστός, Christos. H generatio (where h is shorthand for autem) is written in Latin in Insular majuscule script at the bottom right of the page.
The chi-rho monogram is accorded special dignity in Christian art. Here the chi takes up nearly the whole page, its arms and legs extending to the four corners, exuding a kinetic energy. It reaches, it leaps; it blossoms and enfolds. It is beautified with intricate interlaces, spirals, and lozenges, and it’s teeming with life! Creatures of the land, air, and sea dwell within and around—cats and mice (nibbling on a eucharistic wafer!), birds and moths, an otter and a fish, humans and angels. There are vines and flowers too, and the whirling gears of the cosmos—all of it spilling out of the precious name of Christ.
Peering out from the inner tip of the rho is a red-haired man. Might this represent Jesus? Scholars tend to think so.
This illuminated page combines word (speech) and Word (Logos) with glorious liveliness. “The decoration of the text of Christ’s birth suggests the identification of Christ incarnate with Christ the Creator-Logos,” writes art historian Jennifer O’Reilly. “Christ as the divine Word is here revealed in a word, a single letter, concealed within the design. Similarly, commentators meditating on the name at this point in Matthew’s gospel, described his divinity as lying hidden in his creation, beneath his human flesh at his Incarnation and beneath the literal letter of the scriptural text.”
In his ekphrastic poem “The Book of Kells,” Howard Nemerov subtly draws out this theology—Christ as the Creator of the universe in and by whom all things consist (Col. 1:17). Bearing a rhyme scheme of aa bcbccbbc aa, the poem opens and closes with the same couplet: “Out of the living word / Come flower, serpent and bird.” Again, the word “word” is multivalent, referring to the written word “Christ” that fills the Book of Kells page in the form of a stylized monogram, as well as to Christ the person, the living Word of God, the source of all life. It can also refer to the Bible, which is “living and active” (Heb. 4:12) and which reveals Christ.
Nemerov alludes to the Chi-Rho page’s knotwork, its geometric shapes, its zoomorphic interlaces, and its triskeles (triple spirals), glorying in the sacred beauty and abundance they signify, which some unnamed early medieval monk laboriously sketched and painted over the course of who knows how long, to honor the story of the birth of Jesus Christ.
The Book of Kells’ Chi-Rho page is a phenomenal work of art. The symbol of Christ is all-encompassing, and all of creation is united in harmony with it.
The 2009 animated fantasy drama The Secret of Kells, made by the Irish studio Cartoon Salon, features a wondrous animation of the Chi-Rho page at the end, bringing to life some of its many details:
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30 Rock. Home to NBC Studios and a slew of other business offices, it’s an iconic skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, towering 850 feet and capped by the ticketed Top of the Rock Observation Deck. It forms the backdrop to the famous ice-skating Rink at Rockefeller Center and, in December, New York City’s largest Christmas tree. Designed by architect Raymond Hood, it was originally named the RCA Building (1933–1988) after its main tenant, and then the GE Building (1988–2015), but since 2015 it has been the Comcast Building.
In June I stopped by to take in the art deco sculptures on the exterior, particularly the three limestone bas-reliefs over the main entrance, depicting Wisdom in the center, flanked by Sound on the left and Light on the right. This sculpture group was carved by Lee Lawrie (1877–1963) and painted and gilded by Léon-Victor Solon (1873–1957), who designed the color scheme for Rockefeller Center. Underneath is a trifold screen comprising 240 rectangular blocks of glass cast in eighty-four different molds, executed by Corning Glass Works.
Lee Lawrie (American, 1877–1963), Wisdom, with Light and Sound, 1933. Polychromed limestone, 240 cast-glass bricks. Comcast Building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York City. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
I wanted to see how the iconography works, as I knew the central lintel to feature a Bible verse. It’s an excerpt from Isaiah 33:6: “And wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times, and strength of salvation: the fear of the LORD is his treasure” (KJV). In this oracle from the eighth century BCE, the prophet Isaiah is speaking to the people of Israel as they face threats from Assyria. He assures them that a wealth of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge is theirs as long as they revere God.
It’s not surprising that for this commercial building built in 1933, the biblical quote is truncated to exclude mention of God—the ancient prophet’s words are appropriated to suit a modern corporate context in religiously pluralistic America. Instead of (explicitly) honoring a divine source of wisdom and knowledge, the decorative program celebrates human ingenuity, which is practiced by workers inside the building in the fields of media, medicine, law, and finance, among others.
So what of the imagery that this Bible verse captions?
The central figure of this work represents the genius which interprets to the human race the laws and cycles of the cosmic forces of the universe, and thus rules over all of man’s activities. On the right of the central panel is represented Light, and on the left, Sound—two of these cosmic forces. The compass of the genius marks, on the glass screen below, the cycles of Light and Sound.
Although there are other cosmic forces which govern the universe, Mr. Lawrie selected those of Light and Sound because they are an active and vital part of everyday life, and particularly because within contemporary times great discoveries have been made by means of them, and man’s technical knowledge of the laws of these two forces has been vastly enlarged.
The official title of the sculpture group is Wisdom, a Voice from the Clouds, with Light and Sound. A commanding presence, Wisdom, depicted as a nude male with a long windswept beard, measures, discerns, harnesses, creates. With his right hand he wields a compass to scribe a circle, and with his left he shoves back clouds of ignorance. He embodies humanity’s accumulated philosophical and scientific knowledge and creative power. The male and female figures on either side of him “herald the advent of radio (sound) and the motion picture industry and television (light), two industries that were achieving global significance as the Center was being built,” the Rockefeller Center website says. Circles emanate from Sound’s mouth, and electrical signals from Light’s raised arms.
It’s a humanistic artwork, exuding optimism and complemented throughout the Center by other works such as the four lobby murals by José Maria Sert collectively titled Man’s Intellectual Mastery of the Material Universe (1934), which picture the evolution of machinery, the abolition of slavery, the suppression of war, and the conquest of disease; American Progress (1937), another mural, by Sert; Lee Lawrie’s bronze Atlas(1937), showing the titular Titan holding the celestial vault on his shoulders; and Paul Manship’s gilded bronze Prometheus (1934), depicting the Titan champion of humanity who stole fire (representing technology and culture) from the gods and gave it to humans.
In the art at Rockefeller Center, human agency and advancement are emphasized, but the Christian God is not entirely absent from the narrative they collectively tell. Frank Brangwyn’s Man’s Search for Eternal Truth (1933) in the south corridor of the 30 Rock lobby addresses the importance of Jesus’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, particularly on love and brotherhood, depicting modern folks gathered around an elevated Christ figure and an inscription that reads, “Man’s ultimate destiny depends not on whether he can learn new lessons or make new discoveries and conquests, but on his acceptance of the lesson taught him close upon two thousand years ago.”
A key visual influence on Lawrie’s Wisdom sculpture was William Blake’s Ancient of Days, a hand-colored relief etching that shows a white-bearded nude male crouching in a heavenly sphere with a large golden compass, creating the world. This is Urizen, a mythological deity invented by Blake to personify reason and law.
William Blake (British, 1757–1827), The Ancient of Days, 1794. Relief etching with watercolor, 23.3 × 16.8 cm. This hand-colored print is the frontispiece to Blake’s poem Europe, a Prophecy, copy D, owned by the British Museum in London.
Urizen is a reconfigured version of Yahweh in the Old Testament. The title of Blake’s print is taken from a prophetic vision of the Divine in the book of Daniel: “As I looked, thrones were set in place, and the Ancient of Days took his seat. His clothing was as white as snow; the hair of his head was white like wool. His throne was flaming with fire, and its wheels were all ablaze” (Dan. 7:9 NIV).
This verse has inspired centuries’ worth of iconography picturing God as an old man—because hey, he’s ancient (in fact, he’s the oldest being there is, as he has always existed), and Daniel saw him with white hair! Also, age and wisdom are traditionally correlated.
Depictions of God the Father as a fully anthropomorphized, aged being with white hair didn’t show up until the late Middle Ages and didn’t become a trend until the Renaissance.
When medieval artists portrayed scenes from Genesis 1 and 2, they typically cast Christ in the role of Creator, intentionally avoiding depicting the first person of the Trinity, who is spirit, but also drawing on New Testament references like John 1:1–4 and Colossians 1:15–17 that describe Christ as participating in the creation of the universe. They often gave him a compass, an architectural tool, to show him marking out the planet Earth and celestial bodies with studied precision. Christ is sometimes identified with the person of Wisdom in Proverbs 8, who proclaims that “when he [God] prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass upon the face of the depth . . .” (v. 27 KJV, emphasis mine).
From a Bible moralisée, France, ca. 1225–50. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 2554, fol. 1v.From a Bible moralisée, France, ca. 1225–50. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 1179, fol. 1v.From the Bible of St. Louis (Bible of Toledo), vol. 1, fol. 1v, France, 1226–34. Toledo Cathedral, Toledo, Spain.From the Holkham Bible Picture Book, England, ca. 1327–35. London, British Library, Add. 47682, fol. 2r.From a French translation of Augustine’s De Civitate Dei (The City of God), France, ca. 1370–80. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 22913, fol. 2v. From the Bible historiale of Jean de Berry, France, 1380–90. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 20090, fol. 3r. From Histoire ancienne, depuis la création (Ancient History, Since Creation), France, 15th century. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 250, fol. 13r.From a Bible historiale, France, 1411. London, British Library, Royal 19 D III, fol. 3.From a verse redaction of L’Image du monde, France, 1425–50. London, British Library, Harley MS 334, fol. 34v.
In his epic poem Paradise Lost, John Milton describes how the “Omnific Word” created all that is:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and in his hand He [Jesus] took the golden compasses, prepared In God’s eternal store, to circumscribe This universe, and all created things: One foot he centered, and the other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said, “Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds, This be thy just circumference, O world.” (VII.224–31)
In his making of Ancient of Days, Blake was no doubt influenced by the many visual and literary depictions of God as architect of the universe, as compass-wielding geometer, that came before. And so Lawrie, too, implicitly drew on this heritage when he sculpted the majestic figure of Wisdom for the main building of Rockefeller Center.
At first glance, you might interpret the prominent trio at the Center’s entrance as God creating the heavens and the earth, assisted by angels. But while Christian iconography factored into the design, and a Judeo-Christian sacred text forms the inscription, the sculpture group is mainly meant to represent the promise of science and technology.
Construction began at 30 Rockefeller Plaza during the Great Depression (though the Center was conceived prior to that national economic crisis, in 1927); John D. Rockefeller Jr. said he wanted to build a place where New Yorkers could come and surround themselves with art and motifs that celebrated the best of the human spirit. When you step off West 49th or 50th Street into the plaza that’s featured in so many New York City–set movies and TV shows, Rockefeller’s wish was that you’d feel hopeful and energized.
When I was there, during Pride Month (hence the temporarily rainbow-painted sidewalk), the mood was indeed uplifting, with locals and tourists alike passing through with ice-cream cones and lemonades and conversation. It being summer, the Rink was transformed into an al fresco dining area with umbrella-topped tables providing some relief from the heat.
While my faith in humanity’s future is rooted in God and not ultimately our own capabilities, I am obviously grateful for and supportive of progress and achievement. God wants us to grow in knowledge and skill and to use them responsibly and imaginatively to better the world.
In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” J. R. R. Tolkien says that we humans are “sub-creators” under God, expressing the image of our Creator by exercising creativity. While he was talking specifically about writers creating fantasy worlds, the principle applies to people in any vocation, whether you’re making a book, a bed, or a nanochip. God bids us, “Create!” That we would see ourselves in Lawrie’s Wisdom, crowned and bearing power and authority, is therefore not necessarily arrogant or sacrilegious, as the cultural mandate in Genesis 1:28 charges humans with the noble task of cultivating the stuff of creation, including discovering and leveraging the physical laws of nature, for the flourishing of all.
VIRTUAL ARTIST’S TALK: “The Stations of the Resurrection according to John” with Laura James, July 30, 2024, 7:00–8:15 p.m. ET: Next Tuesday, Bronx-based artist Laura James will discuss her latest painting series, The Stations of the Resurrection according to John, in a live online conversation with patron Rita L. Houlihan. Register at the link above.
The series began in 2021 with four paintings—Called by Name, Jesus Commissions Mary Magdalene, Mary Magdalene Proclaims Resurrection, and Pentecost: Jesus Sends Them Out, collectively the Mary Magdalene and the Risen Jesus series (which you can purchase as a set of cards)—and then expanded to include the full resurrection narrative from John 20. View details of all ten paintings for the first time, and hear from the artist about the artistic choices she made.
The daughter of immigrants from Antigua in the Caribbean, Laura James is especially celebrated for her vibrant paintings that depict biblical figures, including Jesus, as dark-skinned, influenced in part by the long tradition of Ethiopian Christian art. Rita Houlihan, who commissioned the Stations of the Resurrection series from James, is a founding member of FutureChurch’s Catholic Women Preach and Reclaim Magdalene projects and a longtime advocate for the restoration of historical memory regarding early Christian women leaders, especially Mary Magdalene.
VIRTUAL BOOK LAUNCH: Refractions, 15th anniversary edition, by Makoto Fujimura, August 6, 2024, 3:00 p.m. ET: Artist, speaker, writer, and IAMCultureCare founder Makoto Fujimura is one of the most prominent voices in the “art and faith” conversation in the US. On Tuesday, August 6, he’s hosting a Zoom event to celebrate the release of the fifteenth anniversary edition of his essay collection Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art, and Culture, which is updated and expanded. He will read new selections from the book and host a time of Q&A and sharing. Register for the event at the above link, and you will receive a 30% discount on copies of the book preordered before the end of July.
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ART TRAIL: Vessel, miscellaneous locations along the Welsh-English border, August 8*–October 31, 2024: An exciting new art trail has been curated by Jacquiline Creswell [previously] for the group Art and Christianity. From the press release: “Vessel is a curated art trail in remote rural churches near the Black Mountains between Usk and Hay-on-Wye [in the border country between South Wales and England]. Seven artworks by seven [contemporary] artists will be shown in seven churches, six of which are maintained by the Friends of Friendless Churches who keep them open all year round. The theme of ‘vessel’ references bodies, boats, secretions and receptacles; each of the artworks will be sited in a particular relationship to the church and its material culture.”
*Lou Baker’s installation at Dore Abbey opens August 21.
Lucy Glendinning (British, 1964–), White Hart (detail), 2018. Wax, Jesmonite, timber, duck feathers, 175 × 73 × 58 cm. Photo courtesy of Art and Christianity. [artist’s website]
Here is the list of venues, artists, and artworks:
St Michael and All Angels’, Gwernesney, Monmouthshire, Wales: Grace Vessel by Jane Sheppard
St Cadoc, Llangattock Vibon Avel, Monmouthshire, Wales: Wiela by Barbara Beyer
St Mary the Virgin, Llanfair Kilgeddin, Monmouthshire, Wales: Centre by Steinunn Thórainsdóttir
St Jerome, Llangwm Uchaf, Monmouthshire, Wales: White Hart by Lucy Glendinning
St David, Llangeview, Monmouthshire, Wales: Compendium by Andrew Bick
Dore Abbey, Herefordshire, England: Life/Blood by Lou Baker
Castle Chapel, Urishay, Herefordshire, England: Simmer Down I by Robert George
Art + Christianity is offering a weekend retreat September 13–15, based in Abergavenny, that will include a guided minibus tour (led by the curator) to all seven sites, a lecture by Fr. Jarel Robinson-Brown titled “Living Stones: Buildings, Bodies and Spirit,” a presentation and panel discussion on curating and organizing art in rural churches and chapels, and a performance by Holly Slingsby, Felled, Yet Unfurling, that draws on the iconography of the Tree of Jesse. (St Mary’s Priory in Abergavenny houses an extraordinary fifteenth-century oak carving of the Old Testament figure of Jesse that once formed the base of an elaborate sculpture depicting Jesus’s ancestry; to contextualize this artwork, in 2016 a Jesse Tree Window designed by Helen Whittaker was installed in the church’s Lewis Chapel.) Ticket pricing starts at £35 and does not include accommodations.
“As religious affiliation declines, can art provide fresh ways of exploring the questions posed by theology?” Borysewicz asks. “Might art—its creation as well as reception—lead to the discovery of new spiritual information? What do faith traditions lose when they overemphasize the written word and neglect the role of images?
“Historically, faith traditions have focused on both the written word and images as sources of knowledge and meaning. Some would claim that words have taken undue precedence as theologies have developed, while images seem to have been left behind. Has this shift in focus left us wanting?”
Alfonse Borysewicz (American, 1957–), Pomegranate, 2010–11. Oil and wax on linen, 70 × 50 in. The artist said, “When I see a pomegranate at the market, I see it as a visible sign of the resurrection of Christ; or a hive, the community of Christ.”
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SONGS:
>> “Kasih Tuhan” (God’s Love) by Abraham Boas Yarona, performed by Prison Akustik: This video shows, from what I can gather, a group of inmates from Lapas Abepura (Abepura Prison) in Papua, Indonesia, playing and singing an Indonesian Christian song together. It’s one of many lagu rohani (spiritual songs) uploaded to the Prison Akustik YouTube channel (the group is also active on Instagram and TikTok).
>> “Del amor divino, ¿quién me apartará?” (Who Can Separate Me from the Love of God?) by Enrique Turrall and José Daniel Verstraeten, performed by Coro del Seminario Internacional Teológico Bautista: Based on Romans 8:31–39, the lyrics of “Del amor divino” are by Enrique Turrall (1867–1953) of Spain, and the music is by José Daniel Verstraeten (b. 1935). The song was performed in 2018 by a vocal and instrumental ensemble from Seminario Internacional Teológico Bautista (International Baptist Theological Seminary) in Buenos Aires [previously], under the direction of Constanza Bongarrá.The instrumentalists are Jimena Garabaya (guitar), Marcelo Villanueva (charango), and Samy Mielgo (bombo). [HT: Daily Prayer Project]
>> “Caritas abundat in omnia” (Love Aboundeth in All Things) with “O virtus Sapientie” (O Virtue of Wisdom) by Hildegard of Bingen, sung by St. Stanislav Girls’ Choir of the Diocesan Classical Gymnasium, feat. Julija Skobe: Combining two Latin antiphons by the medieval German polymath Hildegard of Bingen [previously], who wrote both the words and music, this song is performed a cappella inside St. Joseph’s Church in Ljubljana, Slovenia, by a student choir with some forty singers between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, directed by Helena Fojkar Zupančič. Mesmerizing! Turn on closed captioning for English subtitles, or see here and here.
Van Engen answers questions from poet Shane McCrae and from the audience, addressing how to read a volume of poetry, how poetry produces an experience, the role of understanding and not understanding when it comes to poems, why Christians in particular should read poetry, hymns as poetry, how Adam’s naming creation in Genesis 2 relates to the task of the poet, his favorite poets, and the qualities of a good poem.
Two especially great questions from attendees were:
How do you imagine poetry nourishing discipleship and/or corporate worship, if used by a church leader?
What, if anything, would you like to see more of from Christian poets writing today?
Regarding the first, he says,
I often think that ministers in particular—and especially the heavier the preaching tradition, the more true this is—need creative literature—poetry, novels, and other things—to enliven what it is they’re doing from the pulpit. Not just to understand human life in all of its flourishing and misery, but to connect to people in different kinds of ways than pure principle and message can do.
He mentions the recurring summer seminar for pastors co-led by Dr. Cornelius “Neal” Plantinga, “Imaginative Reading for Creative Preaching,” to help participants explore the possibilities and homiletical impact of engaging in an ongoing program of reading novels, poetry, short fiction, children’s lit, and nonfiction outside the category of Christianity—not just to mine for sermon illustrations but also to develop a “middle wisdom” (“insights into life that are more profound than commonplaces, but less so than great proverbs”) and to deepen their perception of people.
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PODCAST EPISODE: “Opening Your Bible? Turn on Your Imagination” with Russ Ramsey and Sandra McCracken, The Gospel Coalition Podcast, May 8, 2020: This is a recording of a breakout session—“Reading Scripture with an Engaged Imagination”—from the Gospel Coalition’s 2019 National Conference in Indianapolis. Pastor Russ Ramsey (author of Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith) and singer-songwriter Sandra McCracken (“We Will Feast in the House of Zion,” “Thy Mercy, My God”) discuss the role the imagination plays in reading scripture and understanding and conveying its truth.
Scripture calls for reading with a fully engaged imagination, Ramsey says, because that’s how literature works and that’s how people work. “How are you supposed to understand Scripture if you’re not trying to empathize or get into a situation and walk around inside of it?” he asks. They discuss wonder, mystery, and paradox—the unresolved dissonance and complexity present in many Bible stories—and the need to take a Bible story on its own terms instead of always trying to extract a moral or “life application” from it.
Though they don’t use the term, they’re basically advocating for Ignatian contemplation, a.k.a. the Ignatian method of Bible reading and prayer, in which you put yourself into the story and try to experience it with all your senses. Ramsey demonstrates with the story of Mary and the nard. “In those hours as Jesus is being arrested and tried and flogged and crucified, he smells opulent. And I think we’re supposed to get that, you know. We’re supposed to . . . especially a first-century reader is going to say, ‘He left a lingering scent as he went down the Via Dolorosa, and it was the scent of royalty. And it was the scent of extravagance.’”
Some of the names that come up along the way are Robert Alter, Ellen Davis, Eugene Peterson, and Frederick Buechner.
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IMMERSIVE ART EXPERIENCE:Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee at Frameless in London: I’ve been seeing these kinds of exhibitions advertised more and more—ones that use animation and projection-mapping technology and dozens of loudspeakers strategically placed around the room to create a wall-to-wall, multisensory experience built around one or more masterpiece paintings. Some people say it’s gimmicky or overstimulating, but though I’ve never been to one, I generally think they look like fun! They’re not meant to be a substitute for seeing the actual artwork in person.
In the case of Rembrandt van Rijn’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, though, that’s not possible, as the painting was stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 and has not been recovered. In collaboration with their long-term partner Cinesite, Frameless recently developed an immersive art experience based on the painting—the Dutch master’s only seascape—in which visitors can get a sense of the terror and exasperation Jesus’s disciples must have felt that night they were caught at sea in a torrential wind- and rainstorm while Jesus lay calmly asleep in the boat’s stern (see Matt. 8:23–27; Mark 4:36–41; Luke 8:22–25). Here’s a making-of featurette for that experience, which garnered a nomination for a prestigious Visual Effects Society award earlier this year:
Frameless is permanently housed in the Marble Arch Place in London’s West End cultural district. Christ in the Storm is one of forty-two works of art they riff on across four galleries.
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POEMS:
Here are two poems published this month that each explores a different episode from the story of Jacob’s family in the book of Genesis—one of his wife Rachel stealing her father’s household gods as they flee to Canaan, and one of Jacob’s sons avenging the rape of their sister, Dinah. Both are examples of how poems can stimulate renewed engagement with scripture, as these were stories I had forgotten some of the details of, and the poems did not make sense until I revisited the relevant Bible passages. Poems can help us walk around inside the biblical narratives, both familiar and unfamiliar ones, and see things from the perspectives of different characters, especially ones who are not given a voice in scripture, such as a Shechemite woman taken captive by Jacob’s sons.
>>“Rachel, Cunning”by Patricia L. Hamilton, Reformed Journal: Read the poem first, then Genesis 29–31, then my commentary.
Voiced by Jacob’s second wife, Rachel, in this poem Rachel vents her jealousy over Jacob having first married her sister, Leah, who bore him six sons to her one at this point. This marriage was due to the trickery of her father, Laban, who also tried to cheat Jacob out of fair shepherding wages—so Rachel resents her father. As she prepares to secretly leave Paddan-aram for Canaan with Jacob, Leah, and their children, she steals her father’s teraphim (small images or cult objects used as domestic deities or oracles by ancient Semitic peoples).
In the biblical narrative, Rachel’s motive for stealing the idols is not given. Was she seeking to prevent Laban from consulting them to find out which way she and her family went? Was possession of the gods in some way connected to property inheritance, as some scholars have attested? Was she stealing a blessing from her ancestors? Did she take them for their monetary value? Or leaving her homeland, did she simply wish to take with her a little piece of home, for nostalgia’s sake?
I think the most likely reason is she still believed in these gods’ power—her allegiance to the God of Jacob had not yet been firmly established—and so she stole them for protection. That’s what Hamilton imagines in her poem: that Rachel sees them as “talismans against the spite of brothers,” averting the evil Jacob’s older twin brother, Esau, wished him for his having stolen their father’s blessing that belonged to him. (According to Genesis 27:41–45, before Jacob left for Paddan-aram, Esau had vowed to kill him.)
Marc Chagall (Belarusian French, 1887–1985), Rachel dérobe les idoles de son père (Rachel Hides Her Father’s Household Gods), from The Bible series, 1960. Original color lithograph on Arches wove paper, image size 14 × 10 1/2 in. (35.6 × 26.7 cm).
Caught between two tricksters—her husband and her father—Rachel herself becomes a trickster. When Laban catches up with their traveling party and searches among their possessions for the stolen gods, Rachel, who’s sitting on them, lies and says she cannot get up because she’s menstruating (Gen. 31:34–35). She deceives her deceitful father to keep her deceitful husband and her son Joseph safe from Esau’s rage, as she believes the gods will act in the interests of whoever possesses them. The poem explores the ever-thickening web of deceptions woven in Jacob’s and Rachel’s families and also reminds us that Rachel, remembered now as a great Jewish matriarch, was not raised in the then-still-developing Israelite religion, nor was her turn to Yahweh necessarily immediate upon her marriage to Jacob. I hear in the poem a lament for fraternal and sororal rivalries, and a subtle sad awareness of the vulnerabilities and pressures of women in patriarchal cultures, who are bought and sold in marriage, valued primarily for their childbearing capacities, and typically forced to rely on men for survival, often suffering the consequences of men’s mistakes. (In the poem at least, Rachel’s feeling of insecurity comes from Esau’s threat of vengeance.)
Based on a lithograph by Marc Chagall, this ekphrastic poem is one of twenty-four from the unpublished chapbook Voiced by Patricia Hamilton, all inspired by biblical artworks by Chagall. Hamilton is currently looking for a publisher to take on the collection.
>>“For the Circumcision of a Small City” by Emma De Lisle, Image: The deception continues in Genesis 34; like father, like sons. This poem is based on the episode of the massacre of the men at Shechem by Jacob’s sons Simeon and Levi to avenge the rape of their sister, Dinah. Shechem, meaning “shoulder,” was the name of both the city in Canaan where the rape took place and the Hivite prince’s son who committed the rape. Jacob and his family were sojourning there, having even bought land. After sexually assaulting Dinah, Shechem wanted to make her his wife. Dinah’s brothers were disgusted by this request, but they pretended they would entertain bride-price discussions on the condition that all the males in the city be circumcised. Shechem’s father agreed, and his position as ruler meant the people obeyed. A few days after the mass circumcision, while the men were still sore, Simeon and Levi attacked with swords, killing all the males in the city. Their brothers then joined them in capturing the men’s wives and children and plundering their wealth.
Emma De Lisle’s poem is written from the perspective of a woman of Shechem, taken captive in the slaughter. The women of the city scorned the lengths Shechem was willing to go to for the homely Dinah, barely old enough to have her period. “Jacob’s silence for you” alludes to Genesis 34:5, which says that when he found out about his daughter’s rape, “Jacob held his peace” until his sons returned from the fields. If he felt grief or outrage, it’s not apparent in the scripture text. His initial response was to say and do nothing, and then to defer to his sons, who exact an outsize punishment for the crime that Jacob admits after the fact disappointed him because when word spreads, it will negatively impact the hospitality of other Canaanite cities toward them.
Stanzas 4 and 5 refer to two of Jacob’s previous deceptions: donning goatskins on his hands and neck to impersonate his hairy brother, Esau, before their blind father, so as to steal the blessing of the firstborn (Gen. 27), and altering the breeding pattern of Laban’s flocks to increase the number of spotted sheep and goats (how this is accomplished is vague and has posed difficulties for interpreters) and so enrich himself, as the spotted animals were his agreed-upon wage (Gen. 30:25–43). The implication of this mention is, I think, that men will take what they feel is owed to them, whether by guile or force.
Sometimes women participate in this violence. The poetic speaker wonders whether Dinah will force her or the other captive women to bear children for her (future husband’s) family line, just as her mother, Leah, had used her slave, Zilpah, when her own womb had closed.
“The city bled one way // or another, before your brothers took interest,” the speaker says. Sexual violence was not new to them. The last sentence suggests that Dinah was not the only female victim of the lustful Shechem’s assault—the women of the city paid a price too, seeing their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons murdered in retaliation and themselves taken prisoner.
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ORATORIO: The Book of Romans by Emily Hiemstra (2019): Consisting of musical settings of select passages from the apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans, this piece for SATB soloists, choir, and string orchestra was commissioned by Grace Centre for the Arts, a ministry of Grace Toronto Church, where it premiered October 22, 2019. (Hooray for churches that commission new art!) Read a statement from the composer on the Deus Ex Musica blog. The performers are Meghan Jamieson (soprano), Rebecca Cuddy (alto), Asitha Tennekoon (tenor), Graham Robinson (baritone), Lyssa Pelton (violin), Amy Spurr (violin), Emily Hiemstra (viola), and Lydia Munchinsky (cello).
Here is the video time stamp for each of the eight movements:
0:18: i. Who Has Known the Mind of the Lord? (Rom. 11:33–36)
3:56: ii. His Eternal Power and Divine Nature (Rom. 1:20)
Chagall’s Peace Window is one of the most significant works in the United Nations’ art collection. On my quick visit to New York City last month, where the UN is headquartered, I was hoping to see it, but I emailed ahead of time and found out it’s not currently available for viewing due to construction behind it. (You can “see” it but not really, because it’s not lit, and there’s a tall plastic barrier in front.) I was disappointed, but I decided to visit the UN anyway, to see what other art I might find.
The United Nations was founded in 1945 for the purpose of preventing a third world war. Comprising 193 member states, the organization is committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations, and promoting social progress, better living standards, and human rights. Their motto is “Peace, dignity, and equality on a healthy planet.”
After presenting my ID, getting my photo taken, being stickered, and going through security, I was inside the campus and directed to the General Assembly Building. Outside the entrance to this building is the famous Non-Violence bronze, aka TheKnotted Gun, by Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd of Sweden. The artist made the sculpture in 1980 after his friend John Lennon was murdered. He wanted to honor the singer-songwriter’s vision of a peaceful world.
Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd (Swedish, 1934–2016), Non-Violence, 1984. Bronze, 79 × 44 × 50 in. United Nations Headquarters (outside the General Assembly building), New York. Gift from Luxembourg. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
The original cast was first placed at the Strawberry Fields memorial in New York City’s Central Park, across the street from the Dakota apartment building where Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, lived, and where he was shot. But Reuterswärd worried it would be stolen there. In 1988, the Government of Luxembourg bought the sculpture and donated it to the United Nations, who installed it inside the gate of their New York headquarters.
Non-Violence is an oversize replica of a Colt Python .357 Magnum revolver with the barrel tied in a knot and the muzzle pointing upward, rendering the weapon useless. In his statement from 1988, Reuterswärd said, “Humor is the finest instrument we have to bring people together. While making my peace-symbol, I thought of the importance of introducing a touch of humor, just to make my ‘weapon’ symbolically ridiculous and completely out of order.”
Reuterswärd ultimately made over thirty additional casts of Non-Violence, which are publicly installed in cities such as Beijing, Beirut, Cape Town, Lausanne, and Mexico City.
After spending some time with this iconic work, I entered the General Assembly lobby. What first caught my eye, on the right wall, was a monumental Mola Tapestry from Panama, made by unidentified Kuna women. (To learn about the art form, see my previous blog post from Lent 2022.)
Mola Tapestry by the Kuna people, 1993. Reverse appliqué tapestry, 190 × 284 in. General Assembly Building, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Panama. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
Molas are made using a reverse appliqué technique, in which several layers of multicolored cloth are sewn together and then parts of each layer are cut out to form the design. These textile panels are traditionally made on a smaller scale and sewn onto women’s blouses, but as outside interest in them grew, local artisans started making some to be displayed as wall hangings.
This one shows a colorful array of indigenous flora and fauna, including a toucan, owl, hummingbird, monkey, turtle, frog, squirrel, rabbit, deer, and wildcat.
On the opposite wall is a nearly thirty-foot-long painting titled La Fraternidad (Brotherhood) by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo [previously], which shows a group of people gathered around a fire with interlaced arms. The fire may represent enlightenment, knowledge and power, or the Divine Presence.
Rufino Tamayo (Mexican, 1899–1991), La Fraternidad (Brotherhood), 1968. Oil on canvas, 160 × 358 in. General Assembly Building, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Mexico, 1971. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
At the left is an ancient Aztec or Mayan pyramid, whereas the structure at the right is modern. Tamayo said this shows the span of time, from the ancient era into the present and future.
From 2009 to 2014 the painting was on display at the Mexican state legislature, after which it was restored and returned to the UN.
Situated in front is a replica of an ancient Greek sculpture depicting Poseidon of Artemision, god of the sea, in an active stance. His right hand would have originally wielded a trident, representing his power. At first I thought it an odd choice for the UN to display an apparently militant figure, as Poseidon used his trident as a weapon to fight Trojans, Titans, and others, and indeed here he seems poised to deliver a death blow. But after some rudimentary research, I found that Poseidon also created life-giving springs with the strike of his trident (think Moses striking the rock with his staff), and used it to calm turbulent waters. These ameliorating acts align with the UN’s mission and make the Poseidon sculpture a fitting addition to their collection.
Also in the lobby is a wool tapestry from Latvia. Titled Hope, it’s by the well-known Latvian textile artist Edīte Pauls-Vīgnere.
Edīte Pauls-Vīgnere (Latvian, 1939–), Hope, 1994. Tapestry, 126 × 114 in. General Assembly Building, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Latvia. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
The female figure in the foreground is, I’m assuming, a personification of hope, dressed in a white gown and golden headband and holding the sun. She stands in front of the Freedom Monument in Riga, which shows Lady Liberty holding three gilded stars, symbolizing the three constitutional districts of Latvia.
Deeper inside the lobby was a temporary exhibition, Interwoven: Refugee Murals Across Borders, organized jointly by UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) and Artolution. It opened on June 20, World Refugee Day, and will continue through July 19. The exhibition presents paintings by refugees and host communities in refugee camps, conflict zones, and crisis-affected communities across the world. These were created through a collaborative process in which the work circulated to different locations, with artists contributing additions at each stop. The end results show interwoven narratives of the diverse peoples forced to flee their homes. Themes include joy, lament, labor, empowerment, identity, and home.
Made by about a dozen refugee girls and women from four countries, Fabric of Women’s Resilience began in Uganda with a small group of South Sudanese, who prepared the traditional bark cloth from the bark of a mutuba tree. This substrate then traveled to Bangladesh, where Rohingya women painted a pregnant woman lying on a bed while a female doctor presses a stethoscope to her belly, and on the left, a mother bathing her child. The artists said they wanted to encourage mothers to seek access to prenatal healthcare and to practice good hygiene with their babies.
Fabric of Women’s Resilience, a collaborative painting by approx. twelve Rohingya, Syrian, Afghan, and South Sudanese refugee women, 2018. Acrylic on bark cloth, 24 × 60 in. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
In Greece, the bark cloth traveled to Samos refugee camp, where one young Afghan woman, with the help of others, painted one of her traumatic childhood experiences: being married off at age twelve to an older man. This scene at the top is a bit crumpled in the frame, so it’s difficult to see, but the child bride is crying, and the man has a white beard.
The painting also went to Azraq refugee camp in Jordan, where Syrian women added a woman carrying a baby on her back while reading a book to show that women can be mothers and pursue an education. (This scene was at the extreme right but must have come off; view the full original painting on the exhibition webpage, fourth image down.) It ended its journey with a return to Uganda, where the South Sudanese women filled in the remaining spaces with plants, fish, and fruits.
Other artworks include The Creature of Home and Play in the Midst of Chaos, painted on food distribution bags and as a collaboration between South Sudanese and Rohingya refugees, both children and adults.
The Creature of Home, which traveled to BidiBidi Refugee Settlement in Uganda and Balukhali Refugee Camp in Bangladesh, depicts chickens, a soccer field, memories of home, and tools needed to take care of the land.
The Creature of Home, a collaborative painting by South Sudanese refugees at BidiBidi Refugee Settlement, Uganda, and Rohingya refugees at Balukhali Refugee Camp, Bangladesh. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
Play in the Midst of Chaos, which traveled to BidiBidi Refugee Settlement in Uganda and Bhasan Char Island in Bangladesh, captures a sense of joy with its vivid colors and depiction of sports. It also highlights the importance of planting trees and taking climate action.
Play in the Midst of Chaos, a collaborative painting by South Sudanese refugees at BidiBidi Refugee Settlement, Uganda, and Rohingya refugees at Bhasan Char Island, Bangladesh. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
Seeing the Interwoven exhibition sent me down an internet rabbit trail of learning more about the co-organizer, Artolution, and the work they’re doing, which then impelled me to learn more about the refugee communities in which they’re active. Follow them on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. I also commend to you the Founder Spirit podcast interview with Artolution cofounder and public artist, educator, and humanitarian Max Frieder.
All the above artworks can be seen for free without an appointment. (However, note that the temporary exhibitions change throughout the year.) But to access the sculptures in the garden, which is kept locked, your only option is to pay $26 for the guided, forty-five-minute Garden Tour.
I had seen photos of the biblically inspired Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares and wanted to see it in person, so I paid up. It’s vaguely visible from the vantage of the free-access plaza outside the main entrance of the General Assembly Building.
But let’s move in closer.
Yevgeny Vuchetich (Russian, 1908–1974), Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares, 1959. Cast bronze and granite pedestal, figure 111 × 76 × 35 in., pedestal 44 × 75 × 34 in. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from the USSR. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
Gifted to the United Nations by the USSR in 1959, the bronze sculpture is by the Soviet artist Yevgeny (sometimes spelled “Evgeniy”) Vuchetich, who was of Russian, French, and Serbian heritage and lived most of his life in Russia. It shows a muscular man (modeled by Olympic wrestler Boris Gurevich) hammering a sword into a plow blade, used to cut furrows for planting crops. Representing the transformation of tools of death into tools of life, the imagery is taken from Isaiah 2:4 in the Hebrew Bible, in which the prophet proclaims that “in days to come,” people of all nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they learn war any more.” The vision is that in the kingdom of God, instead of the land being littered with human blood and corpses, it will be cultivated and bring forth good food.
This scripture text is the basis of the African American spiritual “Down by the Riverside” [previously], whose refrain declares, “I ain’t gonna study war no more!” One of the commonly used verses is “I’m gonna beat my sword into a plow.” Here’s Michael Wright’s version:
And, from 1959, the Golden Gate Quartet’s, arranged by Orlandus Wilson:
Reflecting the song lyrics, Vuchetich’s sculpture is itself planted “down by the riverside”—the East River.
Vuchetich was one of the major figures of Soviet government–backed monumental sculpture, making his name from depictions of military heroes. So I find it a little odd that he was commissioned to make this peace sculpture that subverts the very militarism his other sculptures celebrate. One of his most famous pieces is The Motherland Calls; located at the top of Mamayev Kurgan hill overlooking the city formerly known as Stalingrad, it shows a female personification of Russia lifting high a sword in one hand and calling the Soviet people to battle with the other.
Look, many artists will take what work they can get, regardless of whether a commission matches their own ideology. I don’t claim to know what Vuchetich’s personal views were about war, violence, and empire.
Regardless of its disjunction with the artist’s larger oeuvre—and the uncomfortable fact that the donor’s successor state and caretaker of the sculpture, the Russian Federation, is persisting in an illegal and immoral war against its neighbor Ukraine—I really appreciate the theological imagination that Let Us Beat Swords into Ploughshares embodies, entreating us to apply our strength to constructive, not destructive, acts.
Nearby in the garden, not pictured in this article, is a literalization of the “swords into plowshares” principle. A recent gift from the Government of Colombia, Kusikawsay (Quechua for “peaceful and happy life”) is made of steel armaments melted and cast into the shape of a canoe, sailing upward. A donor representative said the sculpture for them symbolizes the end of an over-fifty-year armed conflict in their country. The idea is that the grotesque paraphernalia of war is metamorphosed into a benign watercraft that, in how it’s positioned, symbolizes humanity’s traveling into a lofty future.
Another boat on the UNHQ’s North Lawn is Arrival by the Irish sculptor John Behan, which shows Irish immigrants disembarking into a new world. The sculpture was intended as a thank-you to the many nations that have received the Irish over the years, including Great Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand, and Brazil.
John Behan (Irish, 1938–), Arrival, 2000. Bronze, stainless steel on granite pavers, 26 × 23 ft. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Ireland. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
This piece wasn’t covered by the Garden Tour, nor was the colossal Mother and Child by the Italian artist Giacomo Manzù, which I spotted across the lawn and hurriedly snapped a distant photo of while scurrying to keep up with the group.
Giacomo Manzù (Italian, 1908–1991), Mother and Child, 1989. Bronze, 254 × 66 × 52 in. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Italy. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
One of the pieces our guide did stop for and spend a good amount of time on was a fragment of the Berlin Wall gifted by Germany in 2002, after the wall came down in 1989. The ninety-six-mile-long barrier was erected in 1961 to divide the country into East (Communist) and West (Federal Republic), but a peaceful revolution in East Germany resulted in its fall and the country’s reunification as a federal republic, marking the end of the Cold War in Europe.
Kani Alavi (Iranian German, 1955–), Trophy of Civil Rights (Berlin Wall Fragment), ca. 1998. Precast reinforced concrete wall sections with paint, overall 84 × 114 in. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Germany. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
The front of this three-slab wall fragment (that is, the side visible from the paved path) bears a mural by Kani Alavi, an Iranian artist who moved to West Berlin in 1980, living in an apartment overlooking the formidable “Checkpoint Charlie.” Throughout the 1980s, artists painted images on the west side of the wall as a form of political commentary and resistance. The east side, however, was unpainted during the Cold War because it was so heavily guarded; attempted art interventionists probably would have been shot.
After the border opened on November 9, 1989, and demolition of the wall began, Alavi was a key organizer of what’s known as the East Side Gallery, inviting artists from Germany and around the world to paint murals on the east side of the wall, across a segment that would be deliberately left standing as a memorial. “Alavi helped transform the most visible symbol of the Iron Curtain into an enduring monument to the power of freedom,” Ryan Prior wrote for CNN. This open-air gallery is one of Berlin’s most visited attractions, featuring the work of at least 118 artists from twenty-one countries.
Alavi painted Trophy of Civil Rights (I’m not sure whether that inscription was his or just a remnant from another artist, but it’s become the mural’s de facto title) on a section of remaining wall sometime around 1998. “It is a representation of two people hugging over the wall, a dramatic situation of people trying to get close to each other,” he told NPR through a translator. “It shows how the people were separated. It shows how a culture was divided by a wall. That’s what happened, and that’s what I showed.”
The other side of the wall is painted with miscellaneous graffiti by anonymous artists.
The largest sculpture on the North Lawn, standing at thirty-one feet tall and weighing forty tons, is Good Defeats Evil by the Georgian Russian sculptor Zurab Tsereteli. It depicts the Early Christian martyr-saint George, who was tortured and executed in 303 under the Diocletian persecution. Legends about him started developing in the sixth century and by the thirteenth century were widely circulated and embellished to include a tale of him slaying a dragon to save a Libyan princess whom the terrorized villagers had planned to sacrifice to it for appeasement.
Zurab Tsereteli (Georgian Russian, 1934–), Good Defeats Evil, 1990. Cast bronze figure with dragon formed from sections of two destroyed nuclear missiles, 31 × 18 × 10 ft. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from the USSR. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
(Side note: Saint George is not to be confused with Saint Michael the Archangel from the book of Revelation, who in Christian iconography is usually shown on foot [but occasionally on horseback], also slaying a dragon. The easiest way to tell the two saints apart is that Michael has wings, whereas George does not.)
The most intriguing aspect of this sculpture is that the two-headed dragon is made up of sections of two destroyed nuclear missiles, making the piece a symbol of disarmament. According to the UN website, here
the dragon is not the mythological beast of early Christian tradition, but rather represents the vanquishing of nuclear war through the historic treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States [the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Short-Range Nuclear Missiles, signed in 1987]. Created as a monument to peace, the sculpture is composed of parts of actual United States and Soviet missiles. Accordingly, the dragon is shown lying amid actual fragments of these weapons, the broken pieces of Soviet SS-20 and U.S. Pershing missiles.
The dragon’s two heads thus represent the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals during the Cold War: those of the Soviet Union and the United States.
The last sculpture I’ll mention is Consciousnessby the Mongolian artist Ochirbold Ayurzana. It consists of a rounded, high-luster steel alloy floor plate on which stands a human figure, made of twisted metal strings, examining the footprints they’ve left on the planet. What mark will we make, for good or ill? The sculpture is dedicated to the historic adoption of two global developmental milestone documents: the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.
Ochirbold Ayurzana (Mongolian, 1976–), Consciousness, 2017. Steel, metal on pedestal, 110 × 196 × 125 in. North Lawn, United Nations Headquarters, New York. Gift from Mongolia. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
This is just a selection of the many artworks on view at the United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan. To view a full catalog, click here.
Garden Tours are offered every Wednesday at 2 p.m. from May through August, and Art Tours are offered every other Thursday at 1:15 p.m. year-round—or either one upon request. I’m grateful for their having accommodated me and my husband while we were in town!
I really wish the UN would allow visitors to move through the garden at their own speed, though, as the tour was so fast-paced that I hardly had time to take in a sculpture before we were made to move on to the next one. Approximately one to three minutes was apportioned for each work, which is hardly enough time to sit with the weight and history of some of these pieces. And I didn’t have time to change camera lenses for different types of shots. Because you have to be accompanied by a staff person, you are not allowed to linger behind when the group advances. Some leeway was given to me, but overall I felt rushed. Perhaps the pacing was anomalous because it was such a hot day—in the nineties—and the few shaded areas were prioritized.
Despite the swiftness, I really enjoyed the tour and experiencing and learning about the variety of sculptures and other art pieces from a variety of UN member countries, which celebrate peace, joy, and global unity and project a hopeful future.
Detail of the 6th-century apse mosaic in the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna, Italy. Photo: Fr. Lawrence Lew, OP.
The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.
—Matthew 13:45–46
Jag nu den pärlan funnit har, Som är min själs begär. Du frågar: Vad? Hör då mitt svar: Min Frälsare det är!
I have found the pearl of great price, Which is the desire of my soul. You ask, “What?” Here is my answer: “It is my Savior!”
Whenever hymns are translated from their original languages, modifications to the text are often made to accommodate the meter and end rhyme in the new language. That’s why I’ve provided William Jewson’s literal translation of the Swedish—taken from the liner notes.
Isn’t this song just lovely? I’ve paired it with a Late Antique mosaic from a basilica in northern Italy, showing Jesus’s head at the center of a golden, bejeweled cross. He’s framed by (tesserae-rendered) pearls, suggesting that he is the “pearl of great price” from Matthew 13. This detail is part of a larger Transfiguration scene of sorts (see below).
The parable of the pearl of great price comes from a longer teaching of Jesus’s that compares the kingdom of heaven to a field sown with wheat, a mustard seed, yeast, a buried treasure, and a fisher’s net—images of growth, expansion, value, or ingathering.
To say the kingdom of heaven is like a fine pearl for which a merchant sells all he has is not to suggest that we can buy our way into God’s kingdom; it simply emphasizes the supreme value and desirability of that kingdom. It’s worth everything. We have to go all in—heart, mind, and soul. Sometimes that does mean relinquishing material goods and assets. Wealth can be an impediment to following Jesus if it’s where we place our ultimate love, loyalty, identity, or trust.
Jesus is a gem who wants to be found and cherished. May we be like the merchant, searching and finding, and rejoicing in finding, and willing to give up all to gain Christ.
Apse of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna, Italy. Photo: Berthold Werner.
Juneteenth is a federal holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. It is celebrated annually on June 19, the date on which, in 1865, the Union army finally arrived in the nation’s farthest reaches—Texas—to enforce the proclamation Lincoln had signed more than two and a half years earlier. While the holiday is marked predominantly by joy, it also calls on celebrants to reflect on the complicated meaning of freedom—“freedom that came at the end of the bloodiest war on the American soil where more than 700,000 lives were lost, freedom that came at the death of many enslaved people who never lived to see it, and freedom that people still fight for today,” historian Daina Ramey Berry told Life & Letters. In the words of another historian, Mitch Kachun, Juneteenth is a time “to celebrate, to educate, and to agitate.”
Donate to the MAAFA Redemption Project to support the promise and genius of Chicago’s Black and Brown youth. Or choose another Black cause, publication, individual, or business to invest in.
Watch the documentary All These Sons to learn about how two Chicago organizations are loving and transforming their neighborhoods, seeking to free residents from cycles of violence and help them reclaim their self-worth.
Spend ten minutes looking at and meditating on each of the three rose windows at New Mount Pilgrim. Think of them as visual prayers that you can enter into.
“Read” (that is, view, as it’s almost entirely a picture book) The Middle Passage by Tom Feelings, pausing at each illustration to really feel the weight of the atrocities perpetrated during the transatlantic slave trade. Practice lament.
Watch the groundbreaking miniseries Roots, based on Alex Haley’s novel, which traces the saga of a Mandinka family for three generations, before, during, and after slavery. It originally aired on ABC over eight consecutive nights in 1977, and later that year on BBC One; it’s streaming for free on Tubi (no account needed) in the form of six ninety-minute episodes.
For a firsthand account of slavery written by someone who was himself enslaved, read Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, or passages from it.
Read the poet Lucille Clifton, who writes about Black womanhood, history, family, and religion. A good place to start would be her National Book Award–winning Blessing the Boats.
Peruse the Adinkra Symbol Index, put together by web designer Jean MacDonald, to learn more about this West African writing system and some of the concepts and proverbs represented in it.
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YOUTUBE PLAYLIST: Juneteenth 2024, compiled by Victoria Emily Jones: As a follow-up to the Juneteenth Playlist I published on YouTube in 2022, I’ve put together a brand-new one of nineteen songs, including a ring shout from South Carolina, a Sam Cooke cover, a virtuosic performance by the Trinidadian pianist Hazel Scott, a song-turned-children’s-book by Rhiannon Giddens, some seventies funk, and more. Here are two selections from the list:
>> “Feelin’ Good”: Written in 1964 by English composers Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd, this song became a classic when Nina Simone recorded it the following year for her album I Put a Spell on You. In 2021, Dove, Verve Records, UMe, and the Nina Simone Charitable Trust teamed up to create the first-ever music video for Simone’s version of the song. Directed by Sarah Lacombe and featuring dancer Raianna Brown, the new music video “aims to continue Simone’s important legacy by telling a story of Black female empowerment . . . follow[ing] four generations of Black women living their truths, loving each other, celebrating their hair, and feeling good,” according to the press release.
>> Soul Force by Jessie Montgomery: “Soul Force is a one-movement symphonic work which attempts to portray the notion of a voice that struggles to be heard beyond the shackles of oppression,” writes composer Jessie Montgomery. “The music takes on the form of a march which begins with a single voice and gains mass as it rises to a triumphant goal. Drawing on elements of popular African-American musical styles such as big-band jazz, funk, hip-hop and R+B, the piece pays homage to the cultural contributions, the many voices, which have risen against aggressive forces to create an indispensable cultural place.” It’s performed here by the national youth ensembles NYO-USA, NYO2, and NYO Jazz, established by Carnegie Hall.
The title of the work comes from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he states, “We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.”
I live about an hour north of DC in Central Maryland, so I try to take advantage of some of the many cultural offerings of that city. If you, too, live nearby and don’t already have plans for Juneteenth, here are two ideas of things to do outside the house.
>> STEPPING PERFORMANCE: “Step Afrika! The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence,” Arena Stage, running through July 14: I’ll be going tomorrow, thanks to an invite from a friend! “Using its hallmark style of percussive dance-theater, Step Afrika!’s The Migration: Reflections on Jacob Lawrence tells the story of one of the largest movements of people in United States history, when millions of African American migrants moved from the rural South to the industrial North in the 1900s to escape Jim Crow, racial oppression, and lynchings. Inspired by Jacob Lawrence’s iconic 60-panel The Migration Series (1940-41), this signature work from the award-winning dance company uses the images, color palette, and motifs in the painting series to tell this astonishing story through pulsating rhythms and visually stunning movement.” The performance fuses body percussion, tap, and contemporary dance with live gospel, jazz, and blues.
Here’s a video promo made by New Victory Theater when the show toured there a few years ago:
Jacob Lawrence (American, 1914–2000), “From every southern town migrants left by the hundreds to travel north,” panel 3 from The Migration Series, 1940–41. Casein tempera on hardboard, 12 × 18 in. Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones. [object record]
Browse all sixty panels from The Migration Series at https://lawrencemigration.phillipscollection.org/. Lawrence pictures different aspects of the northern migration story, such as crowded train stations, rotting crops, lynchings, urban housing, educational opportunity, and church life.
>> ART EXHIBITION: Fighters for Freedom: William H. Johnson Picturing Justice, Smithsonian American Art Museum, March 8–September 10, 2024: Another African American artist who was working around the same time as Jacob Lawrence is William H. Johnson (1901–1970). Last weekend I saw his Fighters for Freedom series of paintings at the SAAM—the first time the works have been shown together since 1946. He painted the series in the mid-1940s as a tribute to African American activists, scientists, teachers, and performers as well as international leaders working to bring peace to the world. Interactive kiosks identify the many historical figures. I learned so much! I can picture this exhibition being a good teaching tool for children as well. Spending time with every painting would be overwhelming for them, but choosing a few select artworks as entry points into talking about the freedom fighters depicted and the larger freedom story they’re a part of should work well.
William H. Johnson (American, 1901–1970), Harriet Tubman, ca. 1945. Oil on paperboard, 28 7/8 × 23 3/8 in. (73.5 × 59.3 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.
At the exhibition there are also signs and photos that inform viewers of related artifacts at other Smithsonian museums in the city, including:
(Click on the links for short video features about these objects, made specially for this exhibition.)
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POEMS:
>> “Paul Robeson”by Gwendolyn Brooks: Though in popular culture he is best remembered as an international star of stage and screen, the bass-baritone singer and actor Paul Robeson was also a prominent activist who graduated from law school and fought for civil rights. In this poem, Gwendolyn Brooks celebrates that latter legacy of his, his commitment to seeing the Black community in America, as well as other oppressed people groups around the world, flourish. The powerful final lines—“we are each other’s / harvest: / we are each other’s / business: / we are each other’s / magnitude and bond”—communicate the wisdom that we reap the good fruit that grows from seeds sown by others. She references Robeson’s most famous song, “Ol’ Man River,” sung by the character Joe in the musical Show Boat; the song laments the hardships faced by African Americans and expresses envy of the carefree Mississippi River, which just keeps rolling along, free from toil. But Brooks was happy to see Robeson move beyond the despondency embodied by Joe the deck hand, to take a much more empowered stance in public life.
>>“Juneteenth”by Marilyn Nelson: Here Nelson reflects on the childhood of her mother, Johnnie, who grew up in the all-Black pioneer town of Boley, Oklahoma. In Boley, then as now, June 19 is a “second Easter,” a time of food, family, games, and celebration. After several stanzas spent recounting the lighthearted festivities, the last line lands with a thud, a brutal reminder of the terror these community members fled to establish a place of their own. The poem is ultimately about overcoming, but even as the Black residents of Boley have built a new life for themselves and their families, racism is still a wound they bear. “Juneteenth” can be found in the excellent collection The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poemsby Marilyn Nelson (Louisiana State University Press, 1997).
New Mount Pilgrim commemorates the Maafa, the Great Migration, and martyrs of urban violence and instills hope with trilogy of rose windows, which include an African Christ
Designed by Charles L. Wallace and built in 1910–11, the French Romanesque–style church at 4301 West Washington Boulevard in Chicago’s West Garfield Park neighborhood was originally home to one of the largest Irish Catholic parishes in the city: St. Mel’s (named after Mél of Ardagh, a nephew of St. Patrick from the fifth century). They had the interior decorated with stained glass windows made by the studio of F. X. Zettler in Munich, portraying biblical figures and other saints—all as Caucasian, as was customary at the time and, frankly, still is. St. Mel’s, which merged with Holy Ghost Catholic Church in 1941 (whose parishioners were mainly of German descent), was a flourishing congregation. But in the late 1960s, white people began leaving the neighborhood as Black people moved in, and St. Mel’s membership waned until eventually the church closed its doors in 1988.
After the building had stood vacant for several years, in 1993, the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago sold it to New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, a local Black congregation founded in 1950. The church leaders found that, due to lack of maintenance, the three large rose windows had structural issues that needed to be addressed. Rather than repairing the windows, they decided to replace them with new ones that better reflected the faith stories of their own parishioners—their history, heritage, and aspirations as a community. Rev. Dr. Marshall E. Hatch Sr., who had become the church’s pastor just a month after they moved into the new building and still serves in that role, developed the concepts for the windows with input from the congregation and started fundraising. All three were fabricated by Botti Studio of Architectural Arts in nearby Evanston, Illinois.
The Maafa Remembrance Window
The most striking and theologically profound of the three new windows, and the one I flew to Chicago to see last summer, is the Maafa Remembrance window on the wall to the left of the front altar. Because the church is oriented south rather than the traditional east, this is, directionally speaking, the East Rose Window; it purposefully faces the Atlantic Ocean. It was dedicated December 17, 2000, the church’s fiftieth anniversary year. It replaced an image of the Assumption of Mary (which you can view here); read more about the church building’s original windows on the website of art historian Rolf Achilles.
Maafa Remembrance, 2000, based on an illustration from The Middle Passage by Tom Feelings. Stained glass, diameter 25 feet. New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, West Garfield Park, Chicago. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.Six of the twelve apostles are pictured in these stained glass windows inherited by New Mount Pilgrim from the building’s former owner, St. Mel’s Catholic Church. They appear beneath the newer Maafa Remembrance window, commissioned to counterbalance the preponderance of sacred white personages with sacred Black ones and to tell a narrative of liberation. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
Maafa (mah-AH-fah) is a Swahili word meaning “great disaster” or “great tragedy.” Since the late 1980s it has been used to refer to the transatlantic slave trade of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, during which an estimated 12.5 million African men, women, and children were kidnapped from their homes and forcibly brought to the Americas to work plantations without pay (by and large), building the wealth of their white enslavers. Some scholars prefer the term “African Holocaust” or “Black Holocaust” to describe this historic atrocity.
Based on an illustration by Tom Feelings from his extraordinary book The Middle Passage: White Ships / Black Cargo (Dial, 1995), the East Rose Window commemorates the Maafa through an evocation of the Middle Passage, the second leg of the triangular trade route. On this harrowing two- to three-month voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, which ships made many times over chattel slavery’s multicentury duration, at least two million enslaved Africans died of malnutrition, dehydration, disease, captor-inflicted violence, or suicide.
The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.
In Feelings’s image, an African Christ figure stretches his chained arms out, as if on the cross. His body is constituted by the famous schematic representation of the crowded lower deck of the Brookes slave ship’s human cargo hold, first created in England in 1788 and widely disseminated throughout the nineteenth century. The perspective is such that we’re looking down on a body-as-slave-ship gliding through the waters—but it’s also a crucifixion. The Son of God carries the suffering of the sons and daughters of God, feeling it in his own body. He wears the slave ship like a giant wound that will forever mark him because it has marked his ecclesial body, the church.
The window functions, on one level, as a lament. Consider it in light of the following poem by Lucille Clifton, which draws out the cruel irony of the actual names some ostensibly Christian slave ship owners gave their vessels.
“slaveships” by Lucille Clifton
loaded like spoons into the belly of Jesus where we lay for weeks for months in the sweat and stink of our own breathing Jesus why do you not protect us chained to the heart of the Angel where the prayers we never tell and hot and red our bloody ankles Jesus Angel can these be men who vomit us out from ships called Jesus Angel Grace Of God onto a heathen country Jesus Angel ever again can this tongue speak can these bones walk Grace Of God can this sin live
The speaker of the poem, an enslaved African, addresses Jesus, questioning why he allows them to be so brutally treated—stolen from their homeland, marched to the coast in chains, claustrophobically packed in ship holds for maximum profitability, and spat out onto auction blocks in a barbarous country that appears to practice the devil’s ways more than God’s. How can God abide such sin? What kind of grace is it that transports them into oppression?
Christian Wiman brilliantly unpacks this poem, noting Clifton’s cunningly subtle tweak of a prophetic passage from Ezekiel that promises resurrection, both of individuals and of a nation. Underneath its acerbity, there’s a certain hopefulness to the poem—a hope that this sin will die, this suffering be transformed. In both Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones and Clifton’s poem, Wiman writes,
the Word comes streaming again through, and by means of, the word. In terms of the poem, Jesus (the man) is on board Jesus (the ship), but he is in the hold, just as, when the worship services took place above the captured slaves on the Gold Coast of Africa, God, if he was anywhere, was underneath it all, shackled and sweating and merged with human terror.
Emmanuel, God-with-us.
Clinging to this truth, the psalmist declares, “If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou [God] art there” (Psalm 139:8b). In his great compassion, God descends with us into the depths, and bears us up.
The Maafa Remembrance window plays with the themes of descent and ascent. As Emmanuel, Jesus was below deck, in the miserable belly of the thousands of slave ships that traversed the Atlantic, suffering with those chained inside. Christ’s arms are draped with chains, notes Marshall Hatch Jr., the pastor’s son and cofounder and executive director of the MAAFA Redemption Project (more on that below), “but he’s rising. And at some point those chains will break. That’s the hopefulness that shines through.”
Thus, the window commemorates both tragedy and triumph. It honors those who died on the Middle Passage and through the institution of slavery more broadly while also honoring those who persevered all the way to freedom. Hatch Jr. says this Christ is “carrying within himself the memories of those who lost their lives on the journey to America. But also he’s carrying the legacy of those who survived. And we are that living legacy,” descendants of the Middle Passage.
The border around the window’s central image calls parishioners to “REMEMBRANCE.” They must remember their history, the Great Catastrophe their ancestors endured, and, having faced the truth, commit to ending slavery’s legacy of racism in America’s civic, social, and religious spheres and in their own psyches.
Two of the roundels in the bottom border show a map of Africa and a Communion table laid with kente cloth, a loaf of bread, and a flask of wine. The roundel between these two displays the open word of God, which guides Christians forward in our work of justice and reconciliation.
Art historian Cheryl Finley features New Mount Pilgrim’s Maafa Remembrance window in her book Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton University Press, 2022), which traces the origins of the Brookes schematic and its proliferation in mass culture and art. She identifies the window, twenty-five feet in diameter, as the largest example of the “slave ship icon” in the world and writes that, like the cross of Christ, the slave ship embodies both death and rebirth. It is “a site of death, of dying Africans, and of new life, of a people who would persevere in the face of slavery and unspeakable cruelty to become a free people who helped define the modern era” (6).
“The children will need to know that this symbol, this window, is a representation of not only the pain but also the possibilities of a great and mighty God,” Rev. Dr. Gregory Thomas told the Chicago Tribune in 2000. Thomas was a theology professor at Harvard Divinity School, where Hatch Sr. served a fellowship sabbatical semester in 1999 and first encountered Feelings’s Middle Passage book.
In the window, slavery is interpreted in light of the paradox of the cross. Theologian James H. Cone famously interpreted another, later icon of Black suffering—the lynching tree—in light of the same in his essential book The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis, 2011). He opens the book by explaining why and how the cross has held such power for the Black church:
The cross is a paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.
That God could “make a way out of no way” in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the soul of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life—that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the “troubles of this world,” no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible through God’s “amazing grace” and the gift of faith, grounded in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power—white power—with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat. (2)
A powerful reclamation of Christian iconography, New Mount Pilgrim’s Maafa Remembrance window weds Black history and Christian theology to offer its predominantly African American congregation a communal symbol that honors what they’ve been through as a people and reminds them that they worship a risen Christ who breaks chains and brings life out of death.
The North Star / Great Migration Window
The East Rose Window covered in the previous section is narratively the first in the trilogy of newly commissioned windows, but the first of the three to be fabricated and installed, earlier in 2000, was the North Rose Window, called the North Star or Great Migration window. It commemorates those who traveled north on the Underground Railroad to escape slavery, and, a few generations later (from about 1910 to 1970), as part of a mass movement to escape Jim Crow oppression.
North Star / Great Migration, 2000. Stained glass, diameter 25 feet. New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, West Garfield Park, Chicago. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
The North Star window shows a Black family unit, the father, in purple robe, lifting his newborn up to the heavens in a gesture of gratitude and pride. The child is backlit by the North Star, a beacon to freedom. The scene recalls the famous naming ceremony in the 1977 Roots miniseries, based on the best-selling novel by Alex Haley, in which Omoro Kinte, a Mandinka man living in The Gambia, carries his firstborn son, Kunta Kinte, to the edge of the village, raises him into the starry night sky, and exclaims, “Behold, the only thing greater than yourself!” This declaration affirms the child’s inherent worth and directs him toward worship of his Creator God.
During New Mount Pilgrim’s baby dedication ceremonies, the pastor raises the child in like manner while the parents vow to bring up the child in the nurture and admonition of the Lord and the congregation vows to support them in this task. This physical gesture of lifting up signifies surrender to God and hope that the next generation will carry the flame of faith out into the city of Chicago and the wider world. Because the North Star window is situated across from the pulpit, over the choir loft and organ, it is in full view of the dedicants.
Baby dedication ceremony, New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church. Photo courtesy of Partnering for Community Impact.View from the pulpit of New Mount Pilgrim, facing the North Star window and the main entrance to the church. Photo courtesy of the church.
The inscription below the family in the window reads, “Lift holy hands,” a phrase taken from 1 Timothy 2:8, and the roundels in the border spell out the name of the church. The three portraits at the bottom are of the church’s longest-serving pastors: (from right to left) Rev. J. H. Johnson, the church’s first elected pastor; Rev. James R. McCoy, who served from 1965 to 1993; and Rev. Dr. Marshall Hatch Sr., who has served since 1993. Hatch Sr.’s father and McCoy both participated in the Great Migration, having moved to Chicago from Aberdeen, Mississippi, and so did the majority of the church’s founding members.
The North Star window fills the space previously occupied by a window depicting Saint Cecilia, a Roman virgin martyr.
The Sankofa Peace Window
The West Rose Window, known as the Sankofa Peace window, was the final one to be installed, replacing the clear panes that were there for over two decades. (New Mount Pilgrim sold the original window depicting Mary and the Christ child blessing and accepting the rosary from a male and female saint, to raise funds for the new one.) The Sankofa Peace window was dedicated on February 24, 2019 (watch the service here and view photos here), the year that marked the four hundredth anniversary of race-based slavery in America.
Sankofa Peace, 2019. Stained glass, diameter 25 feet. New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, West Garfield Park, Chicago. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
Sankofa is a Twi word from the Akan people of Ghana that means “go back and retrieve it,” a phrase that encourages learning from the past to inform the future. It comes from the proverb “Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenkyiri”—“It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten,” to return to one’s roots to reclaim lost identity. The concept of Sankofa is traditionally symbolized by a mythical bird with its head turned backward while its feet face forward, carrying a precious egg in its mouth, which represents the knowledge of the past on which wisdom is based.
The Sankofa bird appears in the top center roundel of the window.
Hatch Jr., who preached at the window’s dedication service, discussed Sankofa as a spiritual discipline, highlighting how it can refer not only to returning to one’s cultural roots, but also to God, our Source. “Sankofa is the process of training my soul to reach back and remember the grace and the glory of God,” he says, which can fuel us for the forward journey. He quotes the famous gospel hymn that says, “My soul looks back in wonder how I got over.” We must regale one another with stories of where we’ve been and how far God has brought us, and remind ourselves and each other where we’re heading.
Besides the Sankofa bird, the other four adinkra symbols that New Mount Pilgrim chose to include in the window’s border are:
These are key guiding principles of the church, part of their missional purpose and identity. They seek liberation and peace for all, through the power of God, following the path of the Savior who is Love, who brings us back to who we most truly are.
One way the Sankofa Peace window looks backward while moving forward is through the memorialization of murdered Black American youth, from the civil-rights-era South and twenty-first-century Chicago. The portraits at the top depict the four girls who were killed by the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963: Carole Robertson (age fourteen), Addie Mae Collins (fourteen), Denise McNair (fourteen), and Cynthia Wesley (eleven).
The five teens at the bottom, selected by members of New Mount Pilgrim’s youth leadership committee, were victims of Chicago violence from the previous decade or so. From left to right, they are:
Derrion Albert(1994–2009), age sixteen. On his way home from school, he got caught in the middle of a brawl between two rival factions of students and was beaten to death with a railroad tie. The crime was captured on cellphone video.
Laquan McDonald (1997–2014), age seventeen. He was shot sixteen times by a police officer while he was walking away.
Hadiya Pendleton (1997–2013), age fifteen. She was killed by a stray bullet while hanging out in a park with friends after her final honors exams.
Blair “Bizzy” Holt (1990–2007), age sixteen. He was fatally shot on a CTA bus while shielding his friend from gang gunfire.
Demetrius “Nunnie” Griffin Jr. (2000–2016), age fifteen. A lifelong member of New Mount Pilgrim, he was burned to death in a trash can in a West Side alley. His death was ruled a homicide, but his killer(s) have not been found. He had told his mother that a gang had been trying to recruit him.
All nine children are dressed in traditional African headwear.
Even as the window laments these unjust deaths, it also provides a vision of restoration. The central scene shows Jesus as the Good Shepherd, leading his children to green pastures and still waters lined with thatched-roof homes—an Edenic place of peace and rest. One might view this as the afterlife (Hatch Sr. told me the children are “going back to the Father’s estate”); but it could also be seen as a picture of Christ leading us into a future on this side of the parousia, where all God’s children are safe and thrive on earth as it is in heaven.
Hatch Sr. told me the window is about recovering a village mentality right in the heart of the city, embracing values like hospitality, family, mutual support, elder respect, and the protection and uplift of children. Whereas the North Star window visualizes the literal lifting up of a child, the Sankofa Peace window calls parishioners to do it metaphorically, through the building of strong community and advocacy for policies that prevent violence and tragedy.
The MAAFA Redemption Project
As a tangible outworking of the communal values expressed in its three rose windows, in 2017 New Mount Pilgrim established a workforce, social, and spiritual development program for young Black men in West Garfield Park, which is still running strong. (It graduated its seventh cohort last month!) Called the MAAFA Redemption Project, it is predicated on the belief that redemption and transformation must begin with the individual, and then that personal transformation can effect family and community transformation. The program emphasizes the importance of, as its website says, “remembering the past in order to create a more just and verdant present and future.”
Marshall Hatch Jr., director of the MAAFA Redemption Project (a ministry of New Mount Pilgrim MB Church), speaks with a group of participants about their experiences as young Black men living in West Garfield Park.
Using a dual direct-service and community-building approach, the program provides housing, job training, educational opportunities, psychotherapy, counseling, and wrapround social services to the young men who enroll. These supports are supplemented with programming that focuses on the arts, cultural identity development, spiritual enrichment, transformative travel, civic empowerment, and life coaching and mentoring.
The square-mile neighborhood of West Garfield Park has the highest rate of gun violence in Chicago and is one of the most crime-dense populations in the nation. The MAAFA Redemption Project seeks to recruit men between the ages of eighteen and thirty who are a part of this gun culture or at risk of becoming so, recognizing that young people are a neighborhood’s greatest resource for change. The project affirms the dignity and promise of the neighborhood’s Black and Brown youth and aims to instill hope in them, empowering them in activism against gun violence and the conditions that create it.
“The young people who come to us are tired of the subculture that only produces death, despair, and falling into the trap of the criminal justice system,” says Marshall Hatch Jr., the cofounder and executive director of the MAAFA Redemption Project. “They want something different for themselves and their loved ones.”
He continues, “We want to create the space for young men to see themselves differently, to reimagine themselves as men and leaders, pillars of this neighborhood. And so our goal is to embrace the truths that they give us of their experience but also challenge them to overcome, just as their ancestors overcame; to develop the inner resources to persevere and to challenge the system so that their sons, their daughters, don’t have to fight the same fights.”
The video storytelling unit NBC Left Field ran a wonderful segment in November 2018 that features the work of MAAFA Redemption Project:
I also recommend the feature-length documentary All These Sons (2021), directed by the Oscar-nominated Bing Liu and Joshua Altman (Minding the Gap) and streaming for free on Tubi, Amazon, and other services. MAAFA Redemption Project is one of the two Chicago antiviolence programs profiled, the other being the South Side’s Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) run by Billy Moore.
Most recently, MAAFA Redemption Project has partnered with other groups to build and share ownership of the Sankofa Wellness Village, a series of interconnected capital projects and social enterprises sited along the Madison and Pulaski corridor in West Garfield Park. Winner of the Chicago Prize awarded by the Pritzker Traubert Foundation, the village will be a sprawling, $50 million campus that will bring critical health, financial, and recreational resources back into the disinvested neighborhood, including a wellness center, a credit union, an art center, a business incubator and entrepreneurial support center, and pop-up fresh food markets.
The Sankofa Wellness Village breaks ground later this summer and is expected to open in late 2025.
Having identified the arts as an unmet need and desire of West Garfield Park residents, MAAFA Redemption Project has taken the reins on what will be called the MAAFA Center for Arts and Activism. They are working to restore the old St. Barnabas Episcopal Church to provide a space where residents can engage in intergenerational art making, relationship building, community organizing, political education, and civic empowerment.
Rendering of the future MAAFA Center for Arts and Activism in West Garfield Park, Chicago. Credit: Moody Nolan/Bureau Gemmel
“We’re part of a continuum of that liberation narrative of God,” Hatch Sr. says, referring to his church’s commitment to see their neighborhood flourish.
When in the nineties they inherited a grand church full of Eurocentric stained glass and other decoration from the Irish Catholic community that worshipped there previously, New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church had some decisions to make. How would they honor the history of that sacred space while also making room for their own histories? What adjustments would have to be made to accommodate their different ecclesial and theological tradition? They made a few changes to the sanctuary, but they left most of it intact. The most significant change is the three new rose windows they commissioned to replace the old ones that were buckling. Once the first two were installed, Pastor Marshall Hatch Sr. told me, the space really started to feel like home.
Hatch Sr. spoke to me about “the power of art to reclaim an identity” for youth involved in or susceptible to gang violence. For sure, many local youth have been inspired by the Maafa Remembrance image in particular, which MAAFA Redemption Project uses as its logo, and thus it’s been widely visible throughout the neighborhood. And yet while the “under thirty” demographic is a particular focus of the church’s outreach efforts, the identity-forming power of art holds true for folks of any age. When a West Garfield Park resident enters the New Mount Pilgrim sanctuary for whatever reason—prayer, worship, respite, connection, religious education, compulsion from a family member—they can hopefully see themselves reflected in the imagery of the rose windows, and, in conjunction with the church’s music and preaching ministries, experience healing and revival.
Their culture, their history, their stories are sacralized in stained glass and integrated into the larger story of redemption God is telling.
Perhaps, from viewing the windows, they feel a deep identification with Christ in his crucifixion, or a sense of God’s presence with them in their suffering; perhaps they are dazzled by the dignity and endurance of their ancestors, or are compelled by the freedom Christ offers; perhaps that was one of their friends whose face shines down from the wall, or the niece or nephew of a friend, and they are turned toward somber remembrance of the lost life and moved to concrete action to reduce the city’s violence; perhaps they’re emboldened by the reminder that Christ goes with them as they seek transformation, as they bring to bear the gospel in this present age, in their own lives and the life of their community.
Visit the Church
Address: New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church 4301 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago, IL 60624 (To see the windows in the sanctuary, I made a weekday appointment ahead of time with office manager Rochelle Sykes by calling the church at 773-287-5051. She let me in through the side door.)
The Middle Passage: White Ships / Black Cargo by Tom Feelings (Dial, 1995). This is an important work that every American should own a copy of. It consists of fifty-four powerful grayscale drawings that tell the story of the transatlantic slave trade’s Middle Passage. There’s no written narrative, but there is a brief introduction by the historian John Henrik Clarke. The book caught the attention of Marshall Hatch Sr. while he was a scholar-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School in 1999 and led him to reach out to Feelings for permission to have a stained glass window made based on one of the illustrations.
Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon by Cheryl Finley (Princeton University Press, 2022). Thank you to Marshall Hatch Sr. for recommending this book to me. Finley, an art historian, explores how an eighteenth-century engraving of a slave ship became a cultural icon of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance, its radical potential rediscovered in the twentieth century by Black artists, activists, writers, filmmakers, and curators who have used it as a medium to reassert their common identity and memorialize their ancestors. It’s heavily illustrated and an insightful read, academic in tone but very accessible.
Painting the Gospel: Black Public Art and Religion in Chicagoby Kymberly N. Pinder (University of Illinois Press, 2016). This is where I first found out about the Maafa Remembrance window at New Mount Pilgrim. It’s one of sixty-some Black-affirming religious images from Chicago churches and their neighborhoods made between 1904 and 2015 that Pinder, an art historian, features, focusing on their intersection with the social, political, and theological climates of the times. Read my review here.
“Voices from Chicago’s Most Violent Neighborhood” by Andy Grimm, Chicago Sun-Times, 2023. The Sun-Times spent months last year talking to residents of West Garfield Park about why they’ve chosen to stay despite the rampant violence, and they’ve presented some of these stories in a well-designed, interactive web feature. One of the remarks that stands out to me is: “The most dangerous residents of the neighborhood are also the most endangered.”
Art & Theology 