"Stop by and see the exhibit first," Terry Dempsey urges me.
I want to see Terry again--he's one of my favorite Jesuits. But the exhibit's theme is Good Friday, and it's the first sunny gorgeous day of spring, and I don't feel the slightest inclination to suffer. Sick of dire news, I'm thinking iced coffee, or maybe a glass of less than sacramental wine, on the sunny terrace of Nadoz. Crucifixion does not appeal. I need to do something happy, something hopeful.
Still, Dempsey's a difficult man to say no to. He founded and runs, almost singlehandedly, the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art, the only interfaith museum of its kind in the world. So I dutifully enter the exhibit, bracing myself for the first canvas: Morpheus I, a skull thick with Expressionist paint and the torments of Golgotha.
Then we turn the corner, and I see a bright, primitive painting carved into a wood panel: Jesus praying in the Garden, an insert clock loudly ticking away his last hours of freedom. The artist, Adrian Kellard, died of AIDS soon after making the piece. The shingle at the bottom, a handpainted quote from Scipture in which Jesus relinquishes control to God's will, was lost for years. But just before the exhibit went up, Dempsey tells me, he made one last stab at finding it, calling an artist who had other works by Kellard.
"Yeah, I've got that," she said. "Never knew where it belonged. My mother has it in storage."
It arrived before the exhibit opened, and the painting was made whole again.
Next, Dempsey leads me to an amazing painting by Eleanor Dickinson, Crucifixion of Dountes. Her model was a man who suffered in our time, with no promise of divinity; her canvas was a piece of black velvet urged on her by people in Appalachia. The work is as refined as an Old Master--but oh, it glows on that black velvet.
By now I'm feeling...well, reconciled. Much in the show is stunningly beautiful, especially the Pieta Stone, "bound" by cloth wrappings Steven Heilmer carved smooth from the stone itself. My guard down, I turn and find myself confronted with a list of the world's AIDS deaths, year by year. My stomach clenches; faces flash into mind.
And then I look to the left, where artist Juan Gonzalez has placed three words of text across a montage: "Dont mourn, consecrate."
The ultimate act of hope.
"Hey," Dempsey says, "what about walking across the street for some coffee?"
"Absolutely."
--Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
