In the neo-gothic splendor of New York’s St Patrick’s Cathedral, a throng of today’s immigrants – mostly Latino, Asian, and Black – 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.
The scene, humane and magnificent, is a part of what is perhaps the most significant new piece of public art in today’s riven America.
Titled What’s 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’s 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 – a luminous affirmation of empathy and solidarity.
“What I want people to realize from the mural,” declares the artist, “is that we’re all in this together. And to have this enormous platform to say something like that is an extraordinary privilege.”
St Patrick’s, known as “America’s parish church,” serves about 2.5 million New York Archdiocese Catholics. It’s one of the two most important cathedrals in the country and by far the most visible with 5 million visitors a year. What’s 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.
In Cvijanovic’s competition-winning vision, his mural realizes archbishop cardinal Timothy Dolan’s 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’s was consecrated.
Cvijanovic expands that commemoration to include Irish immigrants of yore – St Patrick’s was the New York church of Irish immigrants – and New York’s broader multicultural immigration. He further honors New York figures notable for their service, both religious and non-religious.
The mural’s long west wall, flanking the cathedral’s 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’s presence. On the north wall, the Knock apparition’s 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’s immigrants includes in their midst Italian-born Mother Cabrini, the 19th-century patron saint of immigrants, and Cuban-born Father Félix 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’s a reverberation here, for this viewer, of the crowd at the Sermon on the Mount.
For the five west-wall Catholic notables the archdiocese named Irish-born archbishop John Hughes, who commissioned the building of St Patrick’s; 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’s 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’s idea too. He’d personally witnessed their brethren in action in the apocalyptic smoke at Ground Zero on September 11.
The mural’s painting style is straightforwardly representational – a deeply purposeful choice.
Because this is an American painting, Cvijanovic tells me, not a European one. “Europeans have hundreds of years of incredible ecclesiastical art,” he said. “They don’t need to do it that way any more. But we do.” The European sort of “anchor sanctuary art-faith places” don’t commonly exist in the US. So when thinking about making imagery for one of the country’s most important churches, Cvijanovic wanted the mural to be “foundational”.
“From a European perspective, the painting is completely retrograde,” he says. “But from an American perspective, it’s needed to form a basis for other things to come out of.”
The Americanizing showcases Cvijanovic’s melting pot of influences. He loves John Singer Sargent, evident in his dashing flair with an Irish immigrant’s complicated dress. John Ford is a “massive” influence – the movie director’s way with figures against a landscape. The lineups of Catholic notables and first responders mirror Eastern Christian iconostases – 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.
And why does the angel over the first responders cradle a firefighter’s helmet and police hat? It’s an emblem of succor and protection that Cvijanovic recalled from a statue of the Virgin Mary cradling a miniature fishing boat atop a seamen’s church near Boston. He even tucks in a little portrait of Mexico’s Diego Rivera (high up on the south wall), an artist’s homage to Rivera’s notoriously removed 1933 leftist mural across Fifth Avenue in Rockefeller Center.
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’s 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’t go to art school. “I didn’t want to make art the way they would teach,” he says simply.
The mural’s 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’s Navy Yard, then nine months for the arduous painting – 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.
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’s great organ above. “Well, my father was an architect,” he replies. “So I understood how to plan for the space.”
As for Cardinal Dolan, who is retiring – and who controversially just now compared the murdered Charlie Kirk to St Paul – he declared at the mural’s presentation to the press: “Some 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.”
“We’re all in this together, “Cvijanovic repeats to me. “Whether we like it or not,” he adds. There are Trump supporters among the models. And multiple different religions. “But shared humanity means shared humanity,” he insists. “It’s not reserved just for whom you get along with.”
