Adam Cvijanovic: What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding, 2024-25

St. Patrick’s Cathedral
New York, NY

September 21, 2025 – ongoing

 Commissioned by His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Adam Cvijanovic’s expansive mural reflects St. Patrick’s Cathedral’s historic role as a sanctuary for New York’s diverse Catholic community. Drawing on the Apparition at Knock—an 1879 Marian vision central to Irish Catholicism—the mural reimagines this moment as a living source of comfort and belonging, carried across the Atlantic by generations of immigrants.

Cvijanovic’s immersive composition unfolds across four sections, weaving the sacred and the everyday. Contemporary immigrants stand beside saints and civic figures—Mother Cabrini, Felix Varela, Dorothy Day, and Archbishop Hughes—while monumental angels offer the city in symbolic protection. The figures of the Apparition appear above disembarking Irish families, linking divine presence to lived experience.

Rendered in oil on canvas with areas of hand-applied gold leaf the painting draws from Baroque drama, Byzantine iconography, and modernist abstraction.

The mural is both a tribute to Catholic tradition and a meditation on American pluralism. In blurring boundaries between past and present, it invites the viewer into a sacred and unfolding story.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1960 and based in Brooklyn, New York, Adam Cvijanovic is a self-taught painter best known for expansive, site-specific works that integrate art into architectural space. His paintings often depict historical and imagined landscapes, with a focus on the relationship between place, memory, and American cultural narratives. Major public commissions include 10,000 Feet, a mural depicting the Indiana countryside for the Alexander Hotel in Indianapolis; a four-panel oil painting in the Mercedes Benz stadium in Atlanta; a 20-by-20-foot ceramic tile piece for a school in Brooklyn; and a project for the Bean Federal Center in Indianapolis, for which he has created 164 individual murals totaling more than 7,000 square feet, portraying American battlefields from the colonial period to the present. Exhibitions and commissions include a solo exhibition at The Hammer in Los Angeles and participation in USA Today at the Royal Academy in London and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, as well as exhibitions at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, MASS MoCA, Tate Liverpool during the Liverpool Biennial, the Walker Arts Center, and the New Orleans Biennial.

Curated by Suzanne Geiss with Seven Willow Collaborative

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