\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>n the neo-gothic splendor of New York\u2019s St Patrick\u2019s Cathedral, a throng of today\u2019s immigrants \u2013 mostly Latino, Asian, and Black \u2013 pause on a hillside slope with their humble sacks and bags. A man in a T-shirt cradles an infant, a kid in sneakers sits glumly in the foreground. Overhead in the towering clouds, the Lamb of God stands on a white altar amid the clustering gleam of golden pendulous stripes evoking the presence of God.<\/p>\n The scene, humane and magnificent, is a part of what is perhaps the most significant new piece of public art in today\u2019s riven America.<\/p>\n Titled What\u2019s So Funny about Peace, Love, and Understanding (after the Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello song), the 25ft-tall multi-part mural by New York artist Adam Cvijanovic celebrates the church and city\u2019s tradition of welcoming immigrants. In this particular time of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents dragging people off the streets, it constitutes a prodigious rallying cry \u2013 a luminous affirmation of empathy and solidarity.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I want people to realize from the mural,\u201d declares the artist, \u201cis that we\u2019re all in this together. And to have this enormous platform to say something like that is an extraordinary privilege.\u201d<\/p>\n St Patrick\u2019s, known as \u201cAmerica\u2019s parish church,\u201d serves about 2.5 million New York Archdiocese Catholics. It\u2019s one of the two most important cathedrals in the country and by far the most visible with 5 million visitors a year. What\u2019s So Funny about Peace, Love, and Understanding represents the largest permanent artwork commissioned by the cathedral in its 146-year history. Prominent art adviser Suzanne Geiss curated the project.<\/p>\n In Cvijanovic\u2019s competition-winning vision, his mural realizes archbishop cardinal Timothy Dolan\u2019s longtime wish to commemorate the celebrated apparition of the Virgin Mary, with Joseph, St John the Baptist, the Lamb of God and angels, at a little rural church in Knock, Ireland, in 1879, the same year St Patrick\u2019s was consecrated.<\/p>\n <\/span>Adam Cvijanovic in front of his mural.<\/span> Photograph: Richard Drew\/AP<\/p>\n Cvijanovic expands that commemoration to include Irish immigrants of yore \u2013 St Patrick\u2019s was the New York church of Irish immigrants \u2013 and New York\u2019s broader multicultural immigration. He further honors New York figures notable for their service, both religious and non-religious.<\/p>\n The mural\u2019s long west wall, flanking the cathedral\u2019s main doors, features a quintet of historic local Catholic notables on one side and on the other, a quintet of modern-day uniformed first responders. Over each grouping hovers a monumental angel in a setting again of those gleaming stripes evoking God\u2019s presence. On the north wall, the Knock apparition\u2019s main holy protagonists float in lustrous glory above bygone Irish arrivals disembarking from a ship. The newcomers are rendered mainly in the whites and blue-grays of a faded photo or film. On the south wall across from them, in colors rich and bright, the throng of today\u2019s immigrants includes in their midst Italian-born Mother Cabrini, the 19th-century patron saint of immigrants, and Cuban-born Father F\u00e9lix Varela, a 19th-century activist for immigrants and the poor. Some of the newcomers look aloft, others gaze ahead resolutely; others seem to be waiting, perhaps listening. There\u2019s a reverberation here, for this viewer, of the crowd at the Sermon on the Mount.<\/p>\n For the five west-wall Catholic notables the archdiocese named Irish-born archbishop John Hughes, who commissioned the building of St Patrick\u2019s; Dorothy Day, the ex-bohemian New Yorker turned social activist for the poor; and Pierre Toussaint, the former enslaved Haitian who became a New York society hairdresser and major Catholic benefactor. Cvijanovic added New York state\u2019s 17th-century Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American canonized, and picked Al Smith, the popular New York politico of the 1920s and 1930s, cigar in hand. The first responders were Cvijanovic\u2019s idea too. He\u2019d personally witnessed their brethren in action in the apocalyptic smoke at Ground Zero on September 11.<\/p>\n The mural\u2019s painting style is straightforwardly representational \u2013 a deeply purposeful choice.<\/p>\n <\/span>Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, with Adam Cvijanovic.<\/span> Photograph: Diane Bondareff\/AP Content Services for the Archdiocese of New York<\/p>\n Because this is an American painting, Cvijanovic tells me, not a European one. \u201cEuropeans have hundreds of years of incredible ecclesiastical art,\u201d he said. \u201cThey don\u2019t need to do it that way any more. But we do.\u201d The European sort of \u201canchor sanctuary art-faith places\u201d don\u2019t commonly exist in the US. So when thinking about making imagery for one of the country\u2019s most important churches, Cvijanovic wanted the mural to be \u201cfoundational\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom a European perspective, the painting is completely retrograde,\u201d he says. \u201cBut from an American perspective, it\u2019s needed to form a basis for other things to come out of.\u201d<\/p>\n The Americanizing showcases Cvijanovic\u2019s melting pot of influences. He loves John Singer Sargent, evident in his dashing flair with an Irish immigrant\u2019s complicated dress. John Ford is a \u201cmassive\u201d influence \u2013 the movie director\u2019s way with figures against a landscape. The lineups of Catholic notables and first responders mirror Eastern Christian iconostases \u2013 but posed as if in action-movie hero posters a la X-Men. Meanwhile the great angels in their spread-winged splendor are inspired by Byzantine masterworks.<\/p>\n And why does the angel over the first responders cradle a firefighter\u2019s helmet and police hat? It\u2019s an emblem of succor and protection that Cvijanovic recalled from a statue of the Virgin Mary cradling a miniature fishing boat atop a seamen\u2019s church near Boston. He even tucks in a little portrait of Mexico\u2019s Diego Rivera (high up on the south wall), an artist\u2019s homage to Rivera\u2019s notoriously removed 1933 leftist mural across Fifth Avenue in Rockefeller Center.<\/p>\n The 64-year-old Cvijanovic has become a leading practitioner of very large-scale art, with, among numerous examples, an epic mural sequence of empty American-involved battlefields for the Bean Federal Center in Indianapolis, and an extravagantly tumultuous depiction of a scene from DW Griffith\u2019s movie Intolerance for a New York gallery. He grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, son of a Serbian immigrant architect who worked closely with Walter Gropius, the German immigrant master of the Bauhaus. Gropius gave him a set of colored pencils when he was a kid, Cvijanovic recalls. He didn\u2019t go to art school. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to make art the way they would teach,\u201d he says simply.<\/p>\n <\/span>Adam Cvijanovic\u2019s mural in St Patrick\u2019s Cathedral.<\/span> Photograph: Richard Drew\/AP<\/p>\n The mural\u2019s enormous labor involved about 30 people, including an eminent fine-art gilder for the (very costly) upper-mural stripes of gold leaf, platinum and heated titanium. It took Cvijanovic five months to sketch the work in his huge studio in Brooklyn\u2019s Navy Yard, then nine months for the arduous painting \u2013 clambering up and down a scaffold to gauge things, and carrying sketches of the angels to the cathedral to assess them taped to the empty walls.<\/p>\n I tell him that the final work, radiant and profoundly stirring in its grandeur and humanity, fits seamlessly into the cathedral. The gleaming stripes seem to merge into the pipes of the cathedral\u2019s great organ above. \u201cWell, my father was an architect,\u201d he replies. \u201cSo I understood how to plan for the space.\u201d<\/p>\n As for Cardinal Dolan, who is retiring \u2013 and who controversially just now compared the murdered Charlie Kirk to St Paul \u2013 he declared at the mural\u2019s presentation to the press: \u201cSome have asked me, are you trying to make a statement about immigration? Well, sure we are, all right? Namely, that immigrants are children of God.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re all in this together, \u201cCvijanovic repeats to me. \u201cWhether we like it or not,\u201d he adds. There are Trump supporters among the models. And multiple different religions. \u201cBut shared humanity means shared humanity,\u201d he insists. \u201cIt\u2019s not reserved just for whom you get along with.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the neo-gothic splendor of New York\u2019s St Patrick\u2019s Cathedral, a throng of today\u2019s immigrants \u2013 mostly Latino, Asian, and Black \u2013 pause on a hillside slope with their humble sacks and bags. A man in a T-shirt cradles an infant, a kid in sneakers sits glumly in the foreground. Overhead in the towering clouds,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26127,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[15713,5484,11437,8482,2052,5301,476],"class_list":{"0":"post-26126","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-cathedral","9":"tag-immigrants","10":"tag-mural","11":"tag-painting","12":"tag-pays","13":"tag-tribute","14":"tag-york"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26126\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}