As immigration has become a bitterly divisive issue, with the Trump administration denying asylum consideration to anyone crossing the border from Mexico and ramping up deportations, St. Patrick’s Cathedral will unveil a huge mural next month that depicts the arrival of immigrants to New York City in the 19th century, along with a huddle of contemporary arrivals — Hispanic, Asian, Black.
“It’s a celebration of a city that has been built by immigrants and where immigrants have been welcomed,” Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, who is also the archbishop of New York, said in an interview in his official residence adjoining St. Patrick’s. The first major art commission in the cathedral since bronze doors were installed at the Fifth Avenue entrance in 1949, it will be dedicated during a mass on Sept. 21.
Roughly 21 feet tall, the mural, of 12 large panels, was painted by the Brooklyn-based artist Adam Cvijanovic (pronounced svee-YAHN-o-vitch), who titled it (with a slight word adjustment) after a song popularized by Elvis Costello, “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Understanding.” Along with immigration, he depicted a historic event dear to the cardinal’s heart: the Holy Apparition at Knock, in which 15 people in the Irish village of that name in 1879 reported seeing the Virgin Mary, two saints and the Lamb of God, a symbol of Jesus Christ, in a vision that lasted for about two hours on a wall of the parish church.
Six artists competed for the commission in 2023. Dolan and a committee of art advisers and donors favored Cvijanovic’s proposal, which is in a realistic style. “The rest of them were a little too Picasso-like,” Dolan said. “I wanted something that people could look at and see the Holy Apparition at Knock, and not that you’d have to be on LSD to figure it out.”
Cvijanovic, 64, who is self-taught, grew up in Cambridge, Mass., where his Yugoslavian-born father taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has made a career out of creating large murals that commemorate historic events and real-life characters, with a romanticism that lies somewhere between 19th-century landscape painting and portraiture and 21st-century video games and commercial advertising.
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