Religious Artists Make The World A Gallery

“Life could be black and white like the old TVs. Instead, God made it like an art gallery.” These are the words of Msgr. Paul Steimel on Aug. 27, 2020, hanging beside his portrait, Clothed in Christ, in the Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center’s new exhibit, ​“Do This In Memory of Me: National Sacred Art Exhibit,” running now through Aug. 25. 

The show — its title taken from the words of Jesus during the Last Supper, before he was crucified — demonstrates the ways in which humans represent and interpret that which they hold sacred, showing how people relate to Christianity and how they can share it with others through the medium of art.

Much of the artwork in the gallery depicts the figure of Jesus in a variety of interpretations. Mia Lang’s drawing Welcome Home shows Christ embracing a faceless figure. There is a humane tenderness in his smile as well as a kind of divine acceptance in the lines of his face. ​“He embraces each of us with open arms when we come to Him freely, and welcomes us back home into His heart,” Lang writes in her artist’s statement. The drawing demonstrates how, for believers, Jesus’s love is both mortal and divine.

Belita William’s painting Body and Blood of Christ shows Jesus’s mutilated and lifeless body, reminding the viewer that the sacrament of communion that Catholics take is, in many ways, an abstraction of a violent act, that their redemption comes at the cost of a terrible sacrifice. The soft lines of Jesus’s torso and legs evoke pathos, the desperately mortal state of death. But beside him lies the emblematic crown of thorns (also an instrument of Jesus’s torture), and a puff of mysterious smoke suggests his spirit rising ascending from earth. 

“We only see a Host, but it really is the Body and Blood of Jesus,” William writes in her artist’s statement. The mortal host may be barren and desecrated, but the spirit transcends the pain and suffering of the image. The hand splayed tenderly across his ribs belongs to his mother Mary, who mourns the physical manifestation of her son even as she recognizes that he isn’t really gone. 

Mary is a frequent subject in the gallery. Merci McCoy’s The Word of God shows her pregnant, shrouded by angels, with the painting following the precept that Jesus was the Word of God made flesh, as it’s written in John 1:14: ​“And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.”

In Eileen Cunis’s tapestry, Mother of the Eucharist, Mary is represented as an important aspect of her son’s humanity, linking him to his physical form. The tapestry is designed to be carried in a Eucharistic procession, an event which encourages members of the community to reaffirm their faith in community with other faithful. 

Other interpretations are more abstract. In Ewe Krepsztul’s series of paintings, each panel represents a stage in Jesus’s life and journey, based on the writing of Saint Anthony of Padua. The first painting, The Word, pays homage to Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam and depicts the connection between mankind and God, as they almost touch, but not quite. The second painting, Became, shows Jesus when he was still in his mother’s womb, a deeply human representation. In the third painting, Flesh, Jesus’s gift to mankind is displayed, his body and blood made into a sacrament.

In Anthony Suppa’s painting, St. Peter Denies Christ, the agony of the sinful — and the possibility of redemption — is represented. Peter is accompanied by a rooster, which in the Bible is the signal of his guilty conscience, and a rather Shakespearean skull, representing his mortality. The earthen vessel he reclines against shows that he is human, and like the vessel and Adam himself, comes from the earth, to which he will return. ​“He is clutching his keys as Satan attempts to sift him like wheat,” wrote Suppa in his artist’s statement, a terrifying addition to an otherwise strangely sympathetic portrayal; the artist knows (as do many viewers) that a repentant Peter will go on to be the first head of the faith that will become the Catholic Church.

Laura Redlinger’s painting, His Presence, shows the ways in which, in Catholic faith, the Eucharist brings mankind closer to Jesus. The piece represents the bread that is Jesus’s body, while the red stones bring to mind the wine that is his blood. ​“While the angle of the monstrance allows one to taste the nearness of Jesus’s Eucharistic presence on earth, so does it also reflect and point to Heavenly realities where He shall no longer be veiled but forever seen ​‘face to face,’” Redlinger writes in her artist’s statement.

Art and religion have often been deeply and closely linked, and ​“Do This In Memory of Me: National Sacred Art” carries on this tradition. Art, a manmade creation, often glorifies the beauty of humanity. When that art is also overtly religious, the link between the tangible and the invisible, between the mortal and the divine, is made stronger. If God made life like an art gallery, as Msgr. Steimel suggested, then where better than an art gallery to celebrate that divine work?