For generations, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City has been known as America’s parish, a historic and architecturally stunning spiritual hub for the nation’s Catholics. But the Gothic revival church, which welcomes upwards of 10 million visitors a year, just got its largest-ever permanent artwork, with a new piece by Adam Cvijanovic, commissioned by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, himself.
“The church has always been a patron of the arts, and I’m glad we’re still able to do it,” Dolan said a press conference unveiling the work, which was dedicated at Sunday mass over the weekend.
Titled What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding—after a song made famous by Elvis Costello—the 25-foot-tall artwork covers three walls in the cathedral’s Fifth Avenue entrance vestibule, or narthex. Formerly “rather drab,” as described by Dolan, who faces the doorway from his perch on the altar, the space is now decorated with a scene that speaks to the history of the parish, of New York City, and of the nation as a whole—as well as the values of the Catholic faith.
It’s a devotional image that doesn’t just venerate the Virgin Mary and other saints. It also honors everyday people, with a panel dedicated to New York City’s first responders. But the artwork also celebrates immigrants across the generations, from the Irish who helped built the cathedral to those who still move here today in the hope of finding a better life. It’s a message of welcome and a reminder that the Catholic church is a place of sanctuary for those facing persecution.
Recalling a Miracle in Ireland
The painting is inspired by a Catholic miracle known as the Apparition at Knock. On August 21, 1879, the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, and St. John the Evangelist are said to have appeared with the Lamb of God to 15 villagers at the parish church in Knock, in County Mayo, Ireland. That same year, across the Atlantic Ocean, the archdiocese of New York officially opened its new cathedral, dedicated to St. Patrick, the patron saint of Irish Catholics.
Dolan, descended from Irish immigrants, has long nursed a devotion to Knock, having made a pilgrimage to the site of the apparition in 2015. (Father Richard Gibbons, the pastor of Knock Shrine, returned the favor by visiting St. Patrick’s for the artwork’s unveiling.)
Creating a mural dedicated to the miracle has been a dream of the cardinal’s for years, originally as part of the plan for the cathedral’s renovation between 2004 and 2015. Funding necessitated a delay—and allowed the project to grow in scope.
“This became not only an ode to Jesus and Mary and Joseph and St. John, [and] the faith of the Irish people who were so instrumental in this archdiocese,” Dolan said. “It also became an ode to those who followed them and found in this city, this country, and yes, in Holy Mother Church, an embrace of welcome.”
Cvijanovic has paired a depiction of the apparition with two scenes of immigration, the saintly vision floating above the Irish disembarking in New York in the 19th century, and the Lamb of God welcoming today’s new arrivals, a diverse group of people from across the globe.
Among them stands the first American saint, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850–1917), an Italian immigrant who founded Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus; and the Cuban-born priest Venerable Félix Varela y Morales (1788–1853), who served as vicar general of the Diocese of New York in the 19th century. Both worked to help the poor and immigrants.
A Celebration of Our Immigrant Past—and Present
“Some have asked me, ‘Are you trying to make a statement about immigration?’ Well, sure we are, alright—namely that immigrants are children of God,” Dolan said.
That’s a message that stands in stark contrast to the anti-immigrant narrative currently being pushed by the Republican party as Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests and deports growing numbers of undocumented immigrants as part of a federal crackdown on immigration.
Another panel of the painting features portraits of Archbishop John Joseph Hughes (1797–1864), who began construction on the cathedral; St. Kateri Tekakwitha (1656–1680), the first Native American saint, born in New York to the Mohawk tribe; Alfred E. Smith (1873–1944), a political reformer who served as governor of New York and was the first Catholic nominated by a major party for president; Servant of God Dorothy Day (1897–1980), co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement; and Venerable Pierre Toussaint (c. 1766–1853), who was born enslaved in Haiti and became a Catholic philanthropist in New York.
“I hope that viewers can see themselves in it,” Cvijanovic said.
All 75 of the figures in the piece are based on real people, with Cvijanovic working with live models—including the lamb, which hails from Franklin Township, New Jersey. For the painting of St. Kateri, he worked with a 15-year-old girl from Massachusetts. Born into the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation and later adopted by a Catholic family, the girl agreed to sit for the painting without knowing who she was posing as. As it turns out, she is preparing for her confirmation in November, and has already chosen Kateri as her confirmation name.
“There’s only one person pictured here who is not an immigrant, or the child of an immigrant, or the grandchild of an immigrant,” Dolan said. “St. Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks. Thank you [Adam] for putting her in there, because it kind of reminds us that there were some people here in the beginning.”
New Art in a Historic Church
“There are very few opportunities in art where you know that something is going to be here 100 years from now,” Suzanne Geiss, who served as the project’s curator, told me. “There absolutely is a different layer of responsibility.”
And despite the Catholic church’s long history as a patron of the arts, there are relatively few contemporary examples of major art commissions. The National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., unveiled new stained glass windows by Kerry James Marshall in 2023, and Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris recently tapped Claire Tabouret for a similar project.
Mindful of the stakes, Geiss worked with Jessica Healy and Kate Kerrigan of advisory firm Seven Willow Collaborative to help St. Patrick’s find the right fit for a new artwork to add to its historic interior.
Cvijanovic’s design was chosen from 15 proposals, which included both figurative and abstract compositions. He painted all 12 of the oil-on-canvas panels at his Brooklyn Navy Yard studio, each one painstakingly cut to fit around the arches and columns in the entryway.
“The architecture was tricky in this case because of these doorways. It’s a very strange space,” Cvijanovic said. “But I thought about it very deeply, and was able to structure it in a way that makes sense.”
The paintings reach toward the heavens, with long strips of gold leaf extending down towards the figures in each panel, like beams of light. This nod to the use of gilding in traditional religious icons also connects visually to the 7,855 metal pipes of the cathedral’s grand organ, just above the paintings. And when the doors of the church are open, viewers will also be able to see across the street to the famed 1937 Atlas sculpture by Lee Lawrie (1877–1963) and Rockefeller Center.
“Adam wanted to it move out to the surroundings, to sort of mirror the Art Deco,” Geiss said.
A self-taught painter, Cvijanovic had caught Geiss’s attention with a massive project he did for the Bean Federal Center in Indianapolis titled “Landscapes of Battle.” He painted 164 individual murals, collectively measuring over 7,000 square feet, of battlefields from throughout U.S. history for the government facility.
When Cvijanovic found out that St. Patrick’s was commissioning a large-scale contemporary artwork, it was “a real shock,” he admitted. “The idea that an institution of faith can re-engage with contemporary art is super exciting and so necessary.… This work wouldn’t have the same meaning if it wasn’t in this institution.”
