Daniel Johnson Fleming (1877-1969) was nearly sixty years old, when he decided that he had something to write about visual arts. In 1937, he was approaching the end of his teaching career at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. As Professor of Missions and a former missionary himself, Fleming had written some twenty books on a variety of mission-related topics during his nearly three-decade career at Union. But visual arts was a topic he had never worked on up to that point. What nonetheless convinced him to venture into this new territory was the beauty of Christian visual arts in missionary fields across the world. Observing the growing diversity of Christian paintings, architecture, and other material objects in Asia, Africa, and other regions over the previous few decades, Fleming compared the situation with the events of Pentecost as depicted in the Book of Acts: just as the Holy Spirit had enabled the diverse linguistic expressions of the gospel at Pentecost, the spirit was now inspiring non-Western Christians to express their faith in “new forms of beauty” with “[their] own brush.”1

• 1
  Daniel Johnson Fleming, Each with His Own Brush: Contemporary Christian Art in Asia and Africa (New York: Friendship Press, 1938), 1.

To record this historic phenomenon, Fleming gathered photos of non-Western local, or what he called “indigenous,” Christian material objects from all over the world through his missionary connections.1 This project resulted in the publication of three books from 1937 to 1940: Heritage of Beauty (1937); Each with His Own Brush (1938); and Christian Symbols in a World Community (1940), which respectively focused on architecture, paintings, and symbols.2 Of the 339 total photos collected in the trilogy, roughly 81 percent came from Asia, 12 percent from Africa, and 7 percent from other regions.

• 1
  Some photos came from Fleming’s personal acquaintances (missionaries, editors, etc.), while others came from magazines, museums, and institutions focused on non-Western Christian art. For the details of these providers, see the “Acknowledgements” section of each of Fleming’s trilogy.
• 2
  Daniel Johnson Fleming, Heritage of Beauty: Pictorial Studies of Modern Christian Architecture in Asia and Africa Illustrating the Influence of Indigenous Cultures (New York: Friendship Press, 1937); Each with His Own Brush: Contemporary Christian Art in Asia and Africa (New York: Friendship Press, 1938); Christian Symbols in a World Community (New York: Friendship Press, 1940).

Fleming’s art trilogy offers a fascinating glimpse into the dynamics of American progressive Christianity, visual arts, and cultural pluralism in the interwar period. Recent scholarship has highlighted liberal Protestants’ contributions to cultural pluralism in the early to mid-twentieth-century United States. As the works of David Hollinger, Christopher Evans, Michael Thompson, and Sarah Griffith show, American missionaries, YMCA officials, and social gospelers fought against nativism, imperialism, and anti-immigration policies in the interwar period, and in so doing built a foundation for liberal internationalism, racial equality, and the civil rights movement.1 In these existing studies, however, the material dimension of liberal Christian engagement with cultural pluralism remains largely understudied. By focusing on Fleming’s effort to introduce non-Western Christian visual arts to the American audience during the 1930s, I intend to fill this scholarly lacuna.2

• 1
  David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017); Christopher H. Evans, The Social Gospel in American Religion: A History (New York: New York University Press, 2017); Sarah M. Griffith, The Fight for Asian American Civil Rights: Liberal Protestant Activism, 1900-1950 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018); Jennifer C. Snow, Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race in America, 1850-1924 (New York and London: Routledge, 2006); Michael G. Thompson, For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015).
• 2
  The intersection of religious liberalism and visual arts has received some scholarly attention in recent years. See, for example, the first part of Sally M. Promey and Leigh E. Schmidt (eds), American Religious Liberalism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2012), which is devoted to “the spiritual in art.”

This article consists of three parts. The first part gives an overview of Fleming’s trilogy, situating it within a broader context of the missionary art movement after World War I. In the second part, I discuss the racial dynamics of Fleming’s trilogy, with a special focus on his collection of Jesus portraits from Asia. Fleming’s project is significant, as this era in American history has generally been considered a moment of peak saturation of images of a white Jesus. In a time when Jesus was, as historians Edward Blum and Paul Harvey point out in The Color of Christ, most commonly visualized as a white man with blond hair and blue eyes, Fleming brought numerous images of Jesus with a non-European appearance, challenging the popular entanglement of whiteness and Jesus at home. Lastly, the third part explores how Fleming handled the problem of “syncretism” in paintings of Jesus. How much latitude did Fleming allow Christian artists in their adoption of symbols associated with non-Christian religions? Could Jesus in a painting wear a Buddhist robe? Should Jesus be presented with a white lotus, a divine symbol in the Hindu tradition? Analyzing Fleming’s commentary on several paintings, I will point out the deep ambivalence of interwar American liberal Protestantism regarding religious pluralism.

Daniel Johnson Fleming was born into a Presbyterian family in Xenia, Ohio in 1877. After graduating from the College of Wooster, he spent eleven years in total in India—first as a teacher of math and science at Forman Christian College in Lahore (1898-1901) and then as a missionary for the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions (1904-1912). After returning to the United States, Fleming studied at the University of Chicago Divinity School and completed his Ph.D. in 1914. Then he started a long-term teaching career at Union Theological Seminary in New York City where he first served as Director of the Department of Foreign Service (1915-1918) and later as Professor of Missions (1918-1944).1 A progressive missiologist, Fleming authored a few dozens of books throughout his career, addressing diverse topics in foreign missions, such as education, social service, imperialism, and ecumenism. Yet toward the end of his career at Union, he abruptly undertook a project on visual arts, architecture, and devotional materials, which culminated in the publication of the trilogy from 1937 to 1940.2

• 1
  My description of Fleming’s life and career here is based on Lydia Huffman Hoyle, “The Legacy of Daniel Johnson Fleming,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 14, no. 2 (April 1990): 68-73; Lydia Huffman Hoyle, “Fleming, Daniel Johnson,” in Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, ed. Gerald H. Anderson (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 1998), 214-5.
• 2
  Fleming’s contribution to interwar missiology has been discussed by scholars in several fields, though far from exhaustively. In the field of American religion, a handful of historians have situated him as a key theorist of liberal missiology. William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 150-156; Grant Wacker, “Second Thought on the Great Commission: Liberal Protestants and Foreign Missions, 1890-1940,” in Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880-1980, ed. Joel A. Carpenter and Wilbert R. Shenk (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990), 291-293; Hollinger, Protestants Abroad, 62-63; Lydia Huffman Hoyle, “Making Missions Ethical: Daniel Johnson Fleming and the Rethinking of the Missionary Enterprise” (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1987). While these scholars discuss Fleming’s engagement with various mission-related issues, they pay virtually no attention to his project on visual arts.
  
  More recently, scholars in the field of World Christianity have noticed Fleming’s contribution to Christian internationalism and indigenization movements in the mid-twentieth century. These scholars consider the interwar “mission studies,” to which Fleming’s work belonged, as an important precursor of the recent academic field of “World Christianity,” because of the former’s pioneering effort to study and promote diverse expressions of Christian faith across the world. In this context, these scholars have occasionally mentioned Fleming’s writings, including those on non-Western Christian art. See for example: Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1996), 183-184; Dana L. Robert, ““The First Globalization?”: The Internationalization of the Protestant Missionary Movement Between the World Wars,” in Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities, ed. Ogbu U. Kalu and Alaine Low (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 116-120; Thomas Coomans, “The “Sino-Christian Style”: A Major Tool for Architectural Indigenization,” in Sinicizing Christianity, ed. Zheng Yangwen (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 197-232 (esp. 219); Dana L. Robert, “Mission Studies and World Christianity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mission Studies, ed. Kirsteen Kim, Knud Jørgensen, and Alison Fitchett-Climenhaga (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 387; Stanley H. Skreslet, Constructing Mission History: Missionary Initiative and Indigenous Agency in the Making of World Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023), 307, 329. Overall, however, these works mention Fleming’s visual arts project only superficially without digging into its actual contents, let alone contextualizing its racial dynamics in contemporary American popular culture.

Although he had done nothing notable related to visual arts before this, his interest in the subject was deeply rooted in a cause he had pursued throughout his career: ecumenism. Art was, for Fleming, a medium for promotion of the unity of Christians worldwide. In the deepening global chaos of the late 1930s, Fleming stressed the necessity for “Christian world fellowship” beyond racial and ethnic boundaries.1 It was for this reason that Christians must get ready to embrace more culturally diverse expressions of Christianity, whether in paintings, architecture, and other religious materials. “As long as we of the West continue to associate our religion only with European or American modes of expression of the Christian experience,” he warned, “we continue to be medieval and to fail to enter into the full meaning of Christian unity—a unity so strongly centered that it can welcome diversity.”2

• 1
  Fleming, Heritage of Beauty, 9.
• 2
  Fleming, Heritage of Beauty, 11.

A pioneering effort in this field, Fleming’s trilogy nonetheless did not emerge ex nihilo. It was rather a culmination of the “missionary art” movement in both Protestant and Catholic churches, which developed especially after World War I. As World Christianity scholars Dana Robert and Andrew Walls point out, Anglo-Protestant organizations, such as the Committee on Christian Literature for Women and Children in Mission Fields (CCLWCMF), began to promote what they called “indigenous” Christian visual arts in missionary fields during the interwar period.1 In India, for example, under Clementina Butler’s leadership, the CCLWCMF supported the production and distribution of Indian-style Christian paintings (some of which ended up reproduced in Fleming’s collection), and hosted annual competitions for such works.

• 1
  On the Committee on Christian Literature for Women and Children in Mission Fields, see Robert, “‘The First Globalization?’” 115-117. Andrew Walls also lists a series of efforts by British Protestants to study so-called indigenous art during the interwar period—articles like “African Art and Its Possibilities” (1927) and “The Arts in the Mission Field” (1931) started to appear in The East and the West and The Church Overseas (both Anglican magazines), while the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel published Worship in Other Lands: A Study of Racial Characteristics in Worship (1933), which offered a collection of liturgical works, visual arts, music, and architecture in missionary fields. (Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History, 182.)

Yet the contemporary event that was by far the most relevant to Fleming’s trilogy was, as he acknowledged it himself, the 1938 meeting of the International Missionary Council at Tambaram, India, which promoted “indigenous” expressions of Christian faith. Its official report declared: “We strongly affirm that the gospel should be expressed and interpreted in indigenous forms, and that in methods of worship, institutions, literature, architecture, etc., the spiritual heritage of the nation and country should be taken into use.”1  Fleming’s project clearly resonated with this general sentiment in the ecumenical Protestant circles. Quoting this passage, Fleming further argued that just as non-Westerners had their own “verbal tongue,” they had their own “artistic language,” by which they had expressed their spiritual sentiments for centuries. If there was no problem with the Bible being translated into various languages, neither should it be a problem for Christian faith to be expressed in aesthetically diverse ways.2

• 1
  The Protestant effort to learn aesthetic matters from Catholics was nothing new in this era. In the United States, Protestants had started to value visual objects in their devotional life during the late nineteenth century, and in that process, they absorbed a lot from Catholic architecture, liturgy, paintings, and other material objects. On the history of the Protestant-Catholic interaction in the artistic arena in the nineteenth century, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years 1790-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Given that the Protestant-Catholic relationship became increasingly cooperative by the mid-twentieth century, Fleming’s inclusion of both Catholic and Protestant artworks in the trilogy seems only natural. On the evolution of the tri-faith or “Judeo-Christian” ideology in the twentieth-century United States, see Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Matthew S. Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); K. Healan Gaston, Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
• 2
  Fleming, Christian Symbols in a World Community, 3.

Yet comprehending Fleming’s trilogy also requires looking beyond the scope of the Protestant missions. The ecumenist Fleming was a close follower of the Catholic Church’s latest efforts in the artistic terrain.1 The Catholic missionary art movement was, as Fleming knew well, far more advanced and systematic than the Protestant counterpart in this era. The idea of cultural accommodation had been emphasized time and again throughout the history of Catholicism, but after World War I this became a more urgent matter. Celso Benigne-Louis Costantini, who was appointed by Benedict XV (Pope: 1914-1922) as Apostolic Delegate to China in 1922, played a crucial role in this process. In China, where the public’s skepticism toward Christianity’s complicity with imperialism was growing during the New Culture Movement, the Catholic Church hurried to promote inculturation and native clerical leadership. Advocating “Sino-Christian” art and architecture, Costantini recruited talented local artists, such as Ch’en Yuandu (Luke Ch’en), and organized Chinese Christian art exhibitions in multiple cities. The art department of Catholic University of Peking (Fu Jen University) became a hub of this movement under Ch’en’s leadership beginning in 1930.2 Deeply admiring such Catholic efforts, Fleming included numerous contemporary Catholic artists’ works in his trilogy, making his collection a truly “ecumenical” enterprise.3

• 1
  The Protestant effort to learn aesthetic matters from Catholics was nothing new in this era. In the United States, Protestants had started to value visual objects in their devotional life during the late nineteenth century, and in that process, they absorbed a lot from Catholic architecture, liturgy, paintings, and other material objects. On the history of the Protestant-Catholic interaction in the artistic arena in the nineteenth century, see T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years 1790-1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Given that the Protestant-Catholic relationship became increasingly cooperative by the mid-twentieth century, Fleming’s inclusion of both Catholic and Protestant artworks in the trilogy seems only natural. On the evolution of the tri-faith or “Judeo-Christian” ideology in the twentieth-century United States, see Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Matthew S. Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); K. Healan Gaston, Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
• 2
  On the development of the Catholic missionary art movement (especially in China) in this era, see Mary S. Lawton, “A Unique Style in China: Chinese Christian Painting in Beijing,” Monumenta Serica 43 (1995): 469-489 (see esp. 470-478); Jeremy Clarke, The Virgin Mary and Catholic Identities in Chinese History (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013): 149-174; Gudrun Löwner, “Christian Art and Architecture in Asia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Christianity in Asia, ed. Felix Wilfred (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 463-464; Coomans, “The ‘Sino-Christian Style,’” 197-219.
• 3
  In fact, quite a few of the individuals and institutions whose support Fleming thanked in the acknowledgements of the trilogy were Catholic. See, for example, Fleming, Each with His Own Brush, 9 and Acknowledgements (unpaginated). Hermann Heuvers, a Jesuit missionary and the president of Sophia University in Tokyo, for example, provided Fleming with pictures of several contemporary Japanese Catholic artists’ works, including Kimi Koseki’s Babyhood of Our Lord. Fleming further consumed Catholic magazines, such as Agenzia Fides and Liturgical Arts, where he was exposed to the latest paintings by non-Western Catholic artists, some of which Fleming reproduced in his books. In his chapters devoted to specific countries like China and Japan, Fleming further discussed the works of Catholic painters and missionaries there in a very appreciative manner. For instance, in the chapter on China in his Each with His Own Brush, Fleming gave a historical overview of the Chinese Catholic missionary art, highlighting the recent accomplishments by Celso Costantini, Luke Ch’en, and other artists at the art department of the Catholic University of Peking (Fleming, Each with His Own Brush, 10-13). As many as five paintings by Luke Ch’en ended up being reproduced in this volume (Fleming, Each with His Own Brush, 22-27).

Fleming’s trilogy presented a variety of material objects, including architecture, paintings, sculptures, and liturgical arts, in Asia and other missionary fields. Among them, nothing may better illustrate this era’s complex interplay of race and religion than his collection of Jesus portraits. From a historiographical point of view, what makes Fleming’s Jesus collection so significant is its chronological correspondence with the peak of white Jesus images in American popular culture. According to Blum and Harvey, whose 2012 pathbreaking work The Color of Christ showed the ubiquity of whiteness in American depictions of Jesus over the centuries, the period between the Civil War and World War II was particularly crucial to the circulation of such images. The end of slavery, the arrival of new immigrants, and America’s imperialist expansion in this era urged Anglo-Americans to reassert their racial superiority at home and abroad, and in that context, white or Nordic Jesus images emerged as an effective tool.1 Meanwhile, industrialization facilitated the mass production of religious pictures, resulting in a rapid dissemination of the images of white Jesus and other biblical figures to Sunday schools, living rooms, and other corners of American society. “[I]n American Sunday schools,” say Blum and Harvey, “the whiteness of Jesus became a religious fact in the psyches of children long before they could experience conversion.”2 Famed painters also joined the production of Jesus images in this era: Henry Stanley Todd’s The Nazarene (1932) and Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ (1941), both of which depicted a masculine Nordic Jesus with blue eyes and blond hair, were among the most popular images in this era (Fig. 1).3

• 1
  Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 141-142.
• 2
  Blum and Harvey, The Color of Christ, 146.
• 3
  Blum and Harvey, The Color of Christ,142-143, 167-169, 208-211.

It is against this background that the significance of Fleming’s Jesus collection is fully understood. Each with His Own Brush, for instance, included sixty-eight examples of “indigenous” Christian visual art (fifty-eight paintings and ten sculptures), thirty-nine of which depicted Jesus in one way or another. Common to virtually all of them was a non-European appearance, which reflected the nationality of each artist. Babyhood of Our Lord (Fig. 2) by Japanese Catholic artist Kimi Koseki (1903-1985) is a good example. Koseki, a female artist trained at the Imperial Art School, Japanized the baby Jesus and other figures with black eyes, black hair, traditional local clothes, and serene facial expressions. The snowy mountains behind the scene further help to create the distinct countryside atmosphere of the Tohoku region in northern Japan, where Koseki herself was from. This piece, as Fleming noted below it, “represents the motherly care in Bethlehem as it would have occurred near Sendai.”1

• 1
  Fleming, Each with His Own Brush, 43.

Gethsemane (Fig. 3) by Luke Ch’en (1902-1967), professor at the art department of the Catholic University of Peking, transformed the famous biblical scene described in Mark 14:32-42 into a distinctly Chinese event. As Fleming noted in his comments on the illustration, in this Chinese garden of Gethsemane, the praying Jesus and the sleeping disciples all look Chinese—and so does the angel—wearing traditional costume and with long black hair flowing down their backs.1 The posture Jesus takes out of respect to the angel—one knee down, hands put together in front of his chest, and head bowed—also reflects traditional Chinese court manners. Fleming considered Madonna and Child (Fig. 4) by Lé-van-dé (1906-1966), a Vietnamese Catholic artist trained at the Hanoi School of Fine Arts, as an equally fascinating Asian effort to indigenize Jesus and Mary. Having studied in Europe during the 1930s, Lé-van-dé most likely knew European paintings of the same subject, and this piece’s composition particularly resembles that of the Renaissance artist Raphael’s paintings of the Madonna and Child. But the dark skin and black hair of Mary and Jesus in this piece set it apart from European religious paintings.

• 1
  Fleming, Each with His Own Brush, 26.

Compared with Asia, Africa was, in Fleming’s observation, far behind in the production of Christian art. “Too little has been done,” Fleming wrote, “in the way of consecrating to Christian use Africa’s gifts of painting, wood-carving and sculpture.”1 His collection of African works was accordingly much smaller than that of Asian ones. Out of the sixty-eight pieces collected in Each with His Own Brush, only eight were from Africa. Yet Fleming saw much value in works like Job Kekana’s A Bantu Calvary (Fig. 5) and Nthenge Nthula’s An African Crucifix (Fig. 6), as he felt they would speak more effectively to the hearts of Africans than European artworks could. With Nthula’s piece, Fleming asked his American readers rhetorical questions: “Compare it, for example, with Rubens’ ‘Christ between Two Thieves.’ Which to Africans would convey more meaning? Which would better touch their minds and consciences?”2

• 1
  Fleming, Heritage of Beauty, 85.
• 2
  Fleming, Each with His Own Brush, 74 (Emphasis original).

Taken together, these and dozens of other Jesus images in Fleming’s collection show that the “color of Christ” in the 1930s was far more contested than usually assumed. In a period when the most prevailing image of Jesus in the United States was a white-skinned, blond-haired, and blue-eyed man, Fleming showcased multiple colors of Christ across the world, challenging the American entanglement of whiteness and religious images.1 Although his work was too modest to shake the powerful dominance of white Jesus images in the United States, each volume of the trilogy was reviewed by various religious magazines, including The Review of Religion, Liturgical Arts, Books for Africa, and The Journal of Religion, in a generally positive manner. One reviewer lauded Fleming’s Each with His Own Brush for giving a “pleasurable shock” with its impressive collection of paintings featuring “the old familiar [biblical] stories in an exotic and unfamiliar garb.” The book made a compelling case, according to this reviewer, that “Christianity no longer belongs to the West, but is truly at home in many lands and cultures.”2 This and other favorable reviews of Fleming’s work suggest that he convinced at least some readers at home that the color of Christ should not be fixated solely on whiteness.

• 1
  Despite the progressive intention, Fleming’s project was still not entirely innocent. In particular, that the terms “indigenous” and “non-Western” were used as synonyms throughout the trilogy is problematic, since it could give an impression that “Western” Christian artworks were, by contrast, non-indigenous—and hence universal. Several times in the trilogy, Fleming did admit that both Western and non-Western Christian material objects were equally particular expressions of the eternal. In Each with His Own Brush, he defended the Asian and African efforts to produce indigenous Christian paintings by reminding his readers that Italian artists had likewise painted numerous “Italian Madonnas.” (Fleming, Each with His Own Brush, 7.) Similarly, in Christian Symbols in a World Community, Fleming wrote, “Western Christian symbols, though older, are just as national as are Asian or African forms, and should not naively be assumed to be ordained for universal use.” (Fleming, Christian Symbols in a World Community, 28.) In reality, however, as Fleming made few efforts to push this point further in the trilogy, his readers very likely just missed it. What he presented under the category “indigenous” was a collection of non-Western artworks, ruling out Western artworks from this category. When, for example, Fleming stated that “Indigenous art … is still in its infancy,” it is clear that Fleming did not count Western religious art, which had existed for centuries and as such must have refuted this very claim, as “indigenous.” (Fleming, Each with His Own Brush, 4.) Thus, while Fleming saw non- Western Christian art as a racially or nationally specific expression of Christianity, he did not make enough effort to see whiteness or racial particularity in Western Christian art. What emerges from here is peculiar asymmetry between white people’s Christianity, which is colorless and universal, and other racial groups’ Christianity, which is ethnic and particular.
• 2
  Review of Daniel Johnson Fleming, Each with His Own Brush, The Review of Religion 3, no. 4 (1939): 502.

But visualizing Jesus in an “indigenous” way was a more complex practice than it might appear. In his search for racially diverse images of Christ, Fleming faced several delicate issues, among which was the challenge of syncretism.1 Producing an “indigenous” artwork involved the incorporation of local landscapes, objects, and habits that were often deeply associated with a local religious culture. To what extent should such non-Christian religious symbols be brought into a portrait of Jesus? The dilemma here was where to establish a boundary between “non-Western” culture, which artists were encouraged to bring into their works, and “non-Christian” elements, which the artists might better avoid using.

• 1
  By exploring Fleming’s discussion of syncretism in the context of missionary art, I hope to offer a historical glimpse into the subject now known as “interreligious art.” Recently, some scholars in the field of interreligious studies have explored the artistic or material dimension of interfaith encounters. Arguing that the previous interreligious studies and practices have too heavily focused on “dialogue,” S. Brent Plate, for instance, calls for a shift to “interreligious aesthetics.” S. Brent Plate, “Interreligious Aesthetics: From Dialogue to the Senses,” CrossCurrents 68, no. 3 (2018): 329-335. Other recent works on interreligious art and aesthetics include: Mary Anderson, “Art and Interreligious Dialogue,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Inter-Religious Dialogue, ed. Catherine Cornille (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 99-116; Anne Barber-Shams, “Interfaith Art for Interfaith Chapels,” Faith & Form 47, no. 2 (2014): 19-21; Melanie Barbato, “Interreligious Art in Light of Hindu and Buddhist Thought,” CrossCurrents 68, no. 3 (2018): 336-351. Yet the majority of this scholarship focuses on contemporary interfaith artistic endeavors, without addressing the rich history of visual arts with multi-religious motifs (such as those found in early-twentieth-century missionary fields).

Depicted in this traditional Chinese-style work is the biblical narrative of the visit of the magi to the infant Jesus (Matthew 2:1-2). Yet what is unique here is the personification in the three wise men of the three major religious traditions of China: Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. As Fleming noted below the piece, “The kneeling figure is a Buddhist monk, as his shaven crown indicates. To the extreme right is a Confucianist, formal and correct in his dignified demeanor. Laotze, with a long beard and with a bottle of the water of mercy in his hand, represents Taoism.”1

• 1
  Fleming, Each with His Own Brush, 18.

This unique composition embodied the idea of inclusivism, which the painter Hsü San Ch‘un (and Fleming himself) seem to have considered as the ideal Christian approach toward other religions. On the one hand, it refuted the old exclusivist idea that non-Christian religions were so corrupted that they possessed no valuable truth to offer. The scene’s peaceful atmosphere also seems to highlight the virtue of mutual respect between religions. On the other hand, the piece also confirmed the subordinate status of these Asian religions to Christianity. In his annotation of this painting, Fleming wrote, “Each [of the three Magi] brings his gift to the infant Jesus. This was meant to symbolize that the old revelations [in the non-Christian religions] are not wholly discarded.”1 Nicely put, this is just another way of affirming the so-called “fulfillment” theology, which holds that non-Christian religions possess some truths but lack others, and therefore, they are to be assimilated and eventually superseded by Christianity. As this position is generous enough to see at least some value in non-Christian religions without compromising Christianity’s superiority, it was particularly popular among liberal Protestants in the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries.2 The point Fleming intended to make through Ch‘un’s work was that Christianity, the final and highest religion, would receive the positive values from other traditions, and in doing so, complete or “fulfill” their missions.3

• 1
  Fleming, Each with His Own Brush, 18.
• 2
  On the popularity of fulfillment theology among liberal and moderate Protestants in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, see for example, Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), especially chapter 2; Richard Hughes Seager, The World’s Parliament of Religions: The East-West Encounter, Chicago, 1893 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), especially chapter 5; Grant Wacker, “Second Thought on the Great Commission: Liberal Protestants and Foreign Missions, 1890-1940,” in Earthen Vessels: American Evangelicals and Foreign Missions, 1880- 1980, ed. Joel A. Carpenter and Wilbert R. Shenk (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990), 289-295. James Freeman Clarke, John Henry Barrows, and William Newton Clarke were among the influential American theorists of fulfillment theology in this era.
• 3
  Despite this Christian triumphalist-sounding position, it should be noted that Fleming was a man of pragmatism who understood that non-Christian religions would in reality continue to exist, and that Christians should try to cooperate with non-Christians in practical matters such as social service. As early as the 1920s, he had suggested to regard other religions as allies in a battle against imminent social problems in the modern world, such as wars, racism, and economic disparities. See Daniel Johnson Fleming, Attitudes toward Other Faiths (New York: Association Press, 1928); Daniel Johnson Fleming, Ways of Sharing with Other Faiths (New York: Association Press, 1929).

On the other hand, Fleming’s comments on one of the works he illustrates suggest that he felt certain reservations when non-Christian elements came onto Jesus’s body, for they could more directly affect the representation of Jesus’s character itself. Fleming hesitated to embrace Yokei Sadakata’s The First Temptation due to its Buddhistic presentation of Jesus (Fig. 10). Sadakata (1882-1966), a Japanese Protestant artist trained by the prominent Buddhist painter Shoseki Kose in Kyoto, produced a unique mixture of Christian and Buddhist elements in this piece.1

• 1
  In both the United States and Japan, extremely little is known about Yokei Sadakata. The single most reliable source written about him is a Japanese article, Shōko Itō and Takutoshi Inoue, “Sueshichiro Sadakata (Kaiseki),” Kwansei Gakuin Shi Kiyō 16 (2010): 183-200. The article offers a short biography of Sadakata with an extensive list of his paintings. The First Temptation is, however, not included in the list. As Sadakata’s house in Tokyo was burnt in the March 1945 bombing of the city, The First Temptation was likely among the many works lost at that time. Interestingly, most of his paintings that can be found on the Internet today are not as explicitly syncretic or multi-religious as The First Temptation is, which suggests that this piece was not necessarily representative of his work. Harvard University’s Houghton Library also possesses a portrait of Jesus by Sadakata, which was presented at an anniversary event of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1960, but the Jesus painted in this piece is not Buddhistic, either. Harvard University, Houghton Library, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Archives, ABC 85:5, Box 3, File: “Portrait of Christ by Yokei Sadakata.”

Though Fleming did not articulate whether he personally agreed with the opinion of these imagined “critics,” there are reasons to read this passage as a manifestation of Fleming’s own unease about Sadakata’s painting. After all, Fleming himself was a liberal Christian with a social gospel inclination, who believed that a genuine religion should aim to save not just individual souls but also society as a whole. As he had stated in his inaugural address as Professor of Missions at Union back in 1918, the purpose of the mission was to “give Jesus Christ his full opportunity with every human being and every aspect of organized society.” While reaffirming a necessity for individuals’ “inward renewal” through Christ, he emphasized, “[God’s] purpose is social…. His interest is not merely in the individual but in the great unit—the human family.” In this address, after listing seven categories of human needs—the “hygienic, economic, educational, social, aesthetic, moral and religious”—Fleming argued that reforming “each of these aspects” would be integral to the “reign of God on earth.”1

• 1
  Daniel Johnson Fleming, “The Inaugural Address by Professor Fleming: Christianizing a World,” Union Theological Seminary Bulletin 2, no. 1 (1918): 13-16, 20. Fleming repeated such social gospel themes through his writings in the interwar period. See for example, Daniel Johnson Fleming, Marks of a World Christian (New York: Association Press, 1919); Daniel Johnson Fleming, Building with India (New York: Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada; West Medford, MA: The Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions, 1922); Daniel Johnson Fleming, Whither Bound in Missions (New York: Association Press, 1925).

As a man of such conviction, Fleming must have found Sadakata’s portrait of the meditative Jesus theologically dubious for its effect of obscuring the ideal of social gospel moralism. Fleming was very likely expressing his own feeling when he let the imagined “critics” go on to conclude, “this picture is definitely in the axis of Buddhism, not in the axis of Christianity, and therefore, is a type of picture not to be encouraged in the indigenous church.”1 The negative perception of Buddhism as a nihilistic and passive religion expressed here was nothing new in American culture. As historian Thomas Tweed points out, such discourse on Buddhism had emerged in the nineteenth century.2 Fleming’s reaction to Sadakata’s piece may only confirm the discourse’s endurance even among liberal Christians in the late 1930s. In the case of Fleming’s project, however, the irony or hypocrisy of having this prejudicial understanding of Buddhism is even greater. He encouraged non-Western Christians to visualize their faith in a way they would feel most comfortable with, but at the end of the day he judged the legitimacy of such artworks based on his own criterion of what Christianity essentially was. Only when an “indigenous” motif aligned with the core principles of Christianity as defined by the American liberal Protestant or social gospel norm was its usage in an artwork fully acceptable.

• 1
  Fleming, Each with His Own Brush, 45.
• 2
  Thomas A. Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism 1844-1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

Fleming’s reaction to this painting illustrates another key assumption widely held among American Protestants in this era. According to David Morgan, American Protestants during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to think that an image of someone’s body (especially the face or head) had a formative impact on the morality and character of the viewers, which was the reason Jesus portraits became an essential part of Protestant devotional life in this era in the first place.1 This might explain part of the reason Fleming wanted to keep Jesus’s body itself free from non-Christian influences, despite the greater tolerance he showed toward non-Christian motifs placed in the backgrounds of portraits. Since Jesus’s posture and facial expression in a painting could shape the feelings and behavior of those who saw it, Fleming was likely afraid that Sadakata’s otherworldly-looking Jesus would shape the viewers’ faith in that image.

• 1
  Morgan, Protestants and Pictures, 10-11.

Fleming’s trilogy illustrates the complex dynamics of race, religion, and visual arts in the interwar United States. Though the extant scholarship highlights the increasing Anglo-Saxonization of Jesus’s body in American visual culture in this era, Fleming’s story reveals a virtually opposite impulse in liberal Protestantism: to search for multiple colors of Christ. By introducing to the American audience numerous non-white images of Jesus from Asia in particular, Fleming attempted to challenge the entanglement of whiteness and religious images in American popular culture. At the same time, his project was not without its own biases. Fleming’s approach to non-Christian religious symbols, for example, shows a quintessentially American liberal Protestant assumption underlying this project. While he tolerated or even welcomed non-Christian motifs in the paintings’ backgrounds, his response to Yokei Sadakata’s The First Temptation suggests he took a more careful approach to Jesus’s body itself lest non-Christian ideas should alter the fundamental character and ministry of Christ. Not surprisingly, in this process, what counted as a “right” way of visualizing Jesus’s body hinged on Fleming’s own understanding of Christianity as a socially engaged missiologist.

Perhaps even greater ironies are found in the aftermath of Fleming’s project. Despite what he did, the dominance of white Jesus in American visual culture remained largely unshaken—if anything, it became even stronger. In 1941, just a year after Fleming’s trilogy was completed, Warner Sallman reproduced The Head of Christ for the mass market for the first time, and through the following few decades, it became arguably the most popular image of Jesus in American history. While the reception of Fleming’s work was largely limited to well-educated liberal Protestants, Sallman’s Jesus was embraced by a much wider swath of American Christians. As David Morgan notes, Sallman’s Jesus became a perfect icon of America’s civil religion during the periods of World War II and the Cold War, inspiring the anxious American people with his powerful and righteous appearance.1 Rather than declining, the reign of the white Jesus thus continued long after the publication of Fleming’s trilogy.

• 1
  On Warner Sallman’s The Head of Christ and its reception in the mid-twentieth-century United States, see David Morgan (ed), Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); David Morgan, Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 248-254. Sallman first produced the piece in 1924 as a front cover of a small denominational magazine, and subsequently made several variations of it, but none gained particular popularity. Only in 1941 when he reproduced the work once more per request of a more popular publisher did it become a huge success.

Another challenge, perhaps a more unexpected one, came from within the Protestant intellectual circles, in which Fleming’s work had originally found some strong sympathizers. As Sally Promey argues, there was an important shift in aesthetic taste among the Protestant intelligentsia in the postwar era, particularly under Paul Tillich’s influence. According to the Tillichian paradigm, the “authenticity” of religious art was no longer determined by traditional subject matter (such as Jesus and the cross). Rather, it became contingent on whether the artwork’s “style” was effective in revealing the deep realities of human existence, such as despair, alienation, and hope. As a result of this shift, explicitly “Christian” artworks could be now seen as unsophisticated, sentimental, or even as kitsch, whereas works in a more abstract style, such as Picasso’s Guernica, which revealed the tragedy of human destiny in a metaphorical and prophetic style, could be recognized as higher forms of religious art.1 This new aesthetic trend likely diminished the appeal of works like those collected in Fleming’s trilogy within the intellectual community. During the 1930s, the artworks Fleming collected were innovative, but just a few decades later, their conventional subject matter rendered them outdated or even dull.

• 1
  On Tillich and the paradigm shift of artistic sensibility among liberal Protestant intellectuals in the postwar period, see Sally M. Promey, “Interchangeable Art: Warner Sallman and the Critics of Mass Culture” in Icons of American Protestantism, 148-80; Sally M. Promey, “Taste Cultures and the Visual Practice of Liberal Protestantism, 1940-1965,” in Practicing Protestants: Histories of the Christian Life in America, ed. Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Schmidt, and Mark Valeri (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 250-293.

A similar shift of emphasis occurred among Asian Christian artists themselves. In the second half of the twentieth century, some Christian artists in Asia started to adopt an abstract expressionist style. When, for example, the Asian Christian Art Association conducted a project to collect hundreds of contemporary Christian artworks from Asian countries and published a portion of them in The Bible through Asian Eyes (1991), it included many paintings influenced by abstraction, such as the Filipino artist Ang Kiukok’s Crucifixion (1969) and the Korean artist Yi Choon-Ki’s Work 86 (date unknown).1 While the paintings presented by Fleming half a century before had directly confronted the whiteness of Jesus by giving him a distinctly Asian body, the abstract painters of the new generation seem no longer interested in that sort of project. At least for certain groups of contemporary artists, the best way to illustrate the divinity of Christ is to make his body and skin color blurred or even unidentifiable—and in so doing they have also blurred Fleming’s legacies.

• 1
  Masao Takenaka and Ron O’Grady, The Bible through Asian Eyes (Auckland, New Zealand: Pace Publishing; Kyoto, Japan; in association with the Asian Christian Art Association, 1991).

Bedazzled, flocked, clad, spangled, stellated, fractured, crystallized: the figures we bring together in this Constellation are positioned in a network that stretches across the sacred, the mystical and the kitsch; sitting amongst the extraordinary and the everyday. Their forms are markedly similar, although their surfaces and dimensions are various—presenting a beguiling range of textures, factures, planes, scales, beings, and becomings to the eye. Sharing an iconic form, their individual meanings and narratives are variously refracted through the shimmer of rock crystal and faceted geodes, covered with brightly colored polyester, pigment, or polychrome plaster, enameled, cast in copper and metal and spangled with glitter. These works bracket the medieval and the (post)modern, and range from the sublime to the quotidian.1  As objects that operate on a formal, thematic spectrum of being/meaning bound up in the iconic form of and fluid, multifaceted understandings around the “Virgin,” they vacillate from the natural to the supranatural, and operate on a sliding scale of material significance and object-based ontology. In so doing, they ask questions that shift from those of spiritual, metaphysical seeing, characteristic of medieval art,2  to the material production and location of value in the iconic forms of consumerist capitalism and in/of endlessly replicated objects (sometimes turned artworks).3

• 1
  For the usefulness of this transhistorical approach, see Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art out of Time (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012); Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010).
• 2
  Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Elizabeth Sears and Thelma K. Thomas, eds., Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002); Elina Gertsman, Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna (University Park: Penn State Press, 2015); Herbert L. Kessler, Experiencing Medieval Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019).
• 3
  Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review, 1939; T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (1982): 139–56.

Consumption and replication, in fact, are two of the linchpins of this Constellation, whereby (repurposed) iconic forms consume original narratives, and, in this consuming, transform them into something else, something other. As Kathryn Lofton provocatively states in Consuming Religion, “consumption is loss”;1  however in the objects we bring together here, and as she also acknowledges, consumption can simultaneously be generative, productive, fertile. A shift, rather than something that obliterates or destroys. In this practice/process inserted materials obscure, unmake, and remake the original, lending new identities and new symbolic significances to the shifting, shifted forms of these figures. Objects, here, largely exist in multiples rather than singularities, doubling and folding and repurposing replicated narrative and object across time and space, in a type of conceptual mise en abyme that deals in the insertion of multiplicities as well as in multiples. If this Constellation had a theme tune, it would be displayed to Madonna’s iconic 1984 track “Like a Virgin,” while concurrently asking “what is unlike a Virgin” through its attention towards material, to materiality, to meaning/making as read across and around form in this group.

• 1
  Kathryn Lofton, Consuming Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 1.

Montgomery’s sculptures, which repurpose mass-produced chalkware Marian figures, utilize a similar impulse some seven hundred years later to ask further questions about recognition and knowing through the presence of matter, object, and rock.1  Montgomery’s practice, which has its roots in collage, is largely concerned with “the unknown of the earth and life, the powers and knowledge of crystals . . . towards nirvana and the afterlife.”2  In both the medieval pair and the contemporary sculptures, the viewer is thus invited to meditate on themes of the seen and unseen and on that which is revealed or concealed. Additionally, the viewer is invited to consider the multiple types of knowledge and knowing these mixed-media forms present, as they bridge the artificial, the natural, and the supranatural, bringing all of these into focus through radical material inclusion and stable figural form.

• 1
  Sally Promey, "Chalkware, Plaster, Plaster of Paris," Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (2014), https://doi.org/doi:10.22332/con.mst.2014.1.
• 2
  "Kyle Montgomery Splices Crystals in Traditional Ceramic Sculptures," Juxtapoz Magazine, July 17, 2017, http://hdl.handle.net/10079/c3ef8b5d-ab43-4182-b98d-6741caa875e6.

From the Katharinenthal Visitation and Montgomery’s crystal Virgins, this nodal network expands to include Katerina Fritsch’s neon yellow sculptures of the Virgin Mary, which, like the shimmering, shifting, mineral sightlines constructed by the previous two examples, play with ideas of the intimately familiar and the uncanny. However, while those of the crystal Virgins and Visitation are produced and mediated by the fractal materiality of mineral insertions, which, as noted, lend their own subtle resonances to the narratives and figures with which they are enmeshed, distilling and refracting the mysticism of these scenes/forms and filtering them through their own hewn surfaces, Fritsch’s work leans on unbroken surface and patina to construct her questions around experiential form/presence. 

Fritsch’s Madonnenfigur works were first created in 1982 and have been reproduced consistently in an unlimited edition, a mode of production that mirrors the abundant and prolific replicas of Virgin statues and figurines produced in the souvenir and commercial church supply market. As well as their inherent multiplicity and their relationship to the replica (something we also find in medieval objects),1 Fritsch’s work also echoes the limitless, boundless apparitions of the Virgin throughout time in their unlimited potentiality. Like Montgomery, Fritsch plays with the banal, repeated form of replicated souvenir Virgin sculptures, specifically, here, the Madonna of Lourdes, but while he relies on destruction/reconstruction of the original and the insertion of effacing, resurfacing geodes to ask questions of these figures and their inherent meanings and resonances, her subversion of this form exists in the shocking coloration and expansive scale given to the figures—in the case of the Virgin of Madonnenfigur (Fig. 3), this is a fluorescent, highlighter yellow.2 Other religious figures have followed the Madonnenfigur, including those composing her Figurengruppe/Group of Figures (first made in 2006–08, and cast in metal for outdoor exhibition in 2010-11), which includes the Edenic serpent, St. Michael and the Dragon, St. Katherine, and others exhibited in the garden of MOMA (Fig. 4), whose sumptuous monochrome surfaces are variously green, purple, black, and white. The Virgin, and accompanying figures, are all monotone, stripped of the visual articulation and applied detail provided by polychromy, employing a use of color that flattens their forms into monochromatic monoliths, rendering them monumental, statue-esque. These hyper-pigmented single-color sculptures are occasionally relieved by a wash of shadow, or a play of light, but exist largely in a closed circuit of color and form which both underscores and disrupts their original narratives: saturating and fixing them in these new, chromatic realities divorced from their iconic, iconographic origins.

• 1
  Anthony Hughes, Sculpture and Its Reproductions (London: Reaktion Books, 1997); Walter Cupperi, “Never Identical: Multiples in Pre-Modern Art,” in Multiples in Pre-Modern Art, ed. Walter Cupperi (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2013).
• 2
  Fritsch’s use of the Madonna of Lourdes here is significant as this particular Madonna is one that is already familiar with relocation. All around the pilgrimage site of Lourdes one can see the/this Madonna in multiples (in retail souvenir shops and carried by pilgrims, as statues or images on candles, on containers for Lourdes’ miraculous holy water, and on banners identifying various church groups on pilgrimage, etc.), thus her practice and its replicated, multiple figures are in dialogue with both the original and the replica/multiple. The authors are grateful to the anonymous readers for their discussion of Lourdes.

While Fritsch’s starting point—the reproduced and ultimately reproducible Virgin statuette—is strikingly similar to Montgomery’s use of found figures, the approach to its subversion is dramatically different, reducing the Virgin to pure form and surface, rather than enhancing and/or augmenting it with crystal (itself understood to be a heavenly material in the case of the medieval imaginary, but also to be intimately and immediately of the earth). In both cases, however, despite the difference of approach and choice of material, the effect is markedly alike. For both, the treatment of the original divorces the figure from its immediate and automatic religiosity (unlike, for example, the Katharinenthal Visitation group, where the crystal insertions deliberately heighten their ability to communicate the sacred to their viewer, revealing the Divine to the eye through the magnifying, amplifying matter of the rock crystal). That said, the undoing of the “automatic” or enmeshed sacred in these versions of Virgins—either via applied pigment, shifting scale, or the forced shattering of the figure which literally defaces the form to replace it with the crystalline geode, is always in conversation with the original (via an interwoven and significant mesh of meaning, figure, type, and trope). Indeed, both Montgomery’s and Fritsch’s Virgin variants underscore the complex waves of knowing and unknowing through material and form found in medieval objects— where the Divine is (imperfectly) revealed through the human, the earthly, and the material, either in their perpetuation of this type of epistemology, or their refutation of it. However, despite these correlations, it is notable that while the material resonances of the geodes of Montgomery’s works could be argued to deliberately enhance the mystical knowledge presented through the form, again echoing the material and spiritual complexity of the Katharinenthal group, Fritsch’s use of material takes us to a rather different set of associations. Her works, which in their repetition and use of multiples and found forms are aligned with Montgomery’s, do not necessarily emphasize the mystical and the metaphysical in their physical, material presence. Instead, through stressing the similarity to mass-produced forms commemorating the apparition of the Virgin, through evoking the souvenir/memory of the apparition and not necessarily the event itself, her figures seem to strip the Virgin of some of her spiritual patina—bringing her closer to the earth-bound and the manufactured, all the while stressing her unearthliness through the application of acid green, yellow, and interstellar violet, or nullifying black and white that envelop the sculptures. 

Heath Kane’s In Brands We Trust series plays with the iconography of the Virgin through a critique of capitalism and the luxury goods market, and his treatment of the Madonna as an iconic form which is enmeshed in ideas of the hybrid and the commodified leans heavily on an intersection with another iconic female entity: Barbie.1  Now, at the moment of writing this, at the tail end of 2023, there is an epistemological fulcrum for thinking about Barbie, who, in popular culture, is very much positioned as “OUR Lady of the moment” following the release of Greta Gerwig’s movie (Fig. 7).2  The movie, much like Barbie as figure/icon/object, and much like the parallel religious use of the Madonna, is both a literal and figurative landmark which deconstructs and reconstructs understandings around socially and culturally constructed icons, a process we also find in the reuse and repurposing of figures addressed here. As a piece of cinema, it is full of visual echoes and quotations and multiplicities, its very opening a recasting of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but it also presents a series of recognizable and replicable visual quotations across both Barbie Land and the Real World. These are based in imagined and experiential encounters that were and are and have subsequently been desired/commodified to greater or lesser extent, particularly in the various pieces of Barbie-movie-adjacent merchandise produced in the wake of the film (not the least of which are the myriad t-shirts, including from that beloved bastion of American capitalism, Target, emblazoned with “I am Kenough”). We also see this relationship to the echoic multiple in the visual quotations of real world products that are filtered into the world of the Barbies, plasticized replicas rendered into flat, dimensionless sticker-space which co-exist with generic three-dimensional ur-objects, which all construct the real qua reality. These are a stabilizing force in Barbie Land. It is, in large part, the replication of the real, through replicas of “real” objects that allows us to believe in this place as a fantastical parallel of our place, which remains firmly situated in reality. However, this process, although stabilizing, is not itself stable—the replicated simulacra of Barbie Land, with all its glossed pink ideomania, is, in turn, replicated in the here and the now (a process vastly heighted and accelerated since the movie) whereby the replica both makes and unmakes the real, and vice versa: a process of visual quotation we also find around the endless visual quotation of the Virgin.

• 1
  For more on the blurring of religion and popular culture see Lofton, Consuming Religion.
• 2
  We thank one of our anonymous readers for this line, which perfectly encapsulates the connections between Barbie and the Virgin Mary in this Constellation. Gerwig’s film is the highest grossing US box office film of 2023, and the highest grossing film with a female director ever. "The Highest Grossing Film of 2023 Worldwide BARBIE," CISION: PR Newswire, September 5, 2023, http://hdl.handle.net/10079/16607851-cce9-4799-88f0-daef4eb86755; Its release marks the first time many movie-goers chose to return to the cinema after the COVID-19 pandemic and widening home releases via internet streamers— a move that might be likened to a pilgrimage, or the collective and mobilizing desire to be in close proximity to a cult figure. Tony Maglio, "Nearly 1 Out of 4 of ‘Barbie’ Viewers Hadn’t Gone to the Movies Since COVID," IndieWire, August 11, 2023, http://hdl.handle.net/10079/91abe2f8-6978-43dd-a36d-ceb1a12d17ef.

We see this in Kane’s sculptural series of multiples, which includes two iterations of the Madonna: one made of shiny chrome, the other of white fiberglass (Figs. 8a, 8b, 8c). Each takes the form of the Miraculous Virgin, with hands outstretched. The Virgin’s head, however, has been replaced with the head of Malibu Barbie. While this beheading and reheading is significant, the monochrome harmony of the sculpture makes recognizing this as a Frankenstein form difficult at first glance.1  It is only Barbie’s round sunglasses perched atop her head, in Kane’s sculptures, that reveal the provenance of the head, and locates the limen between Malibu Barbie and the Madonna. On the other hand, Kane’s prints from the same series, which feature a monochromatic Barbie-cum-Virgin Mary figure in front of familiar brand logos, including McDonald’s and Mattel’s own Barbie logo (Figs. 9a and 9b), present a figure much more identifiable as the familiar doll, here draped in the iconography of the Virgin. In the prints, unlike the sculpture, the original brand, and the importance of the visual recognition of that brand, are intrinsic to these works. These are intriguing composites, which blend the iconography of the Virgin with those of the iconic doll to create a new form which operates in the inbetween of religion and capitalism, play and faith. One, a hot pink Barbie/Virgin on a white ground is backed with a halo-esque roundel bearing the name “Barbie” in Mattel’s hyper recognizable script, pictorializing and narrativizing her as something the viewer understands to belong to the sacred, while labeling her as Barbie-donna. The other demonstrates a similar mix of complex ideology/branding and familiar iconography, placing a blue Barbie/Virgin in front of a gilt, hand-glittered representation of the familiar “Golden Arches” logo which resonates with still other religious iconography beyond just the Madonna—it evokes a mandorla, like that of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as well as the glitter of the metallic haloes of Sienese gold-ground panel paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, such as those of Simone Martini’s Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus (Fig. 10), or Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maestà (Fig. 11), conflating logo and logos. Moreover, in addition to this glittering sacral aura, this motif visually evokes the idea of wings, rendering her as both quasi-angelic figure and a patron saint/guardian of commerce. Such golden borders, used in religious art to demarcate the sacred, are thus also employed here to delineate the frameworks of consumption that surround these Barbie-donnas.

• 1
  Karen Barad, “TransMaterialities,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2-3 (2015): 387-422.

The compulsion to create an analogy between the Virgin Mary and Barbie is also revealed in the French artist Soasig Chamaillard’s creations, particularly Sainte Barbie (Figs. 12a and 12b)—some versions of which challenge racialized assumptions around the whitewashing of the Madonna, but some of which don’t—presenting a spectrum of possibilities around the visual presentation of the Virgin. Chamillard positions these as seemingly interchangeable, calling into question the possibility of a post-racial consumable theology akin to that surrounding the market-driven doll, which responds to the desires of its consumer base and societal demands for diverse representation.1  This representational spectrum not only more accurately acknowledges the non-whiteness of a historical Virgin Mary, but perhaps speaks to the invention of a more broadly relatable consumable version that calls into mind the idealized Barbie Land of Greta Gerwig’s film, where, although “stereotypical Barbie” portrayed by Margot Robbie is white and blonde-haired, her fellow Barbies present a diverse utopia, a world that is outside of racism, sexism, and ableism.2  In Chamaillard's work, this position is reflected through the use of damaged religious sculptures made into something more akin to commercial toys where the possibilities of both representation and commodification are interwoven. Some of Chamaillard's sculptures use Barbie’s distinctive face to replace that of the Virgin, or position Pikachu in the arms of the Virgin Mary instead of the infant Jesus. In yet another iteration, the Miraculous Virgin bears the helmeted head of a Power Ranger, while her garments are painted in the bold flat colors of their uniforms: pink, red, blue, yellow, and green, linking back to Fritsch’s use of saturated monochrome. Although they have adopted diverse material and formal approaches to their sculptures, Kane and Chamaillard both exploit the analogy of the Virgin Mary and Barbie. Barbie, in a postmodern context, is as recognizable as the Virgin Mary. Like the Virgin, who is commonly represented as Our Lady of Lourdes, Fatima, Loreto, and Guadalupe, as the Queen of Heaven, the Star of the Sea, the Miraculous Madonna or Mother of Mercy, Barbie has many guises as well—Malibu Barbie, Working Woman Barbie, Dream Date Barbie, Mars Explorer Barbie, a multiplicity and duality explored and exploited by these works.

• 1
  On premodern conceptions of race, see: Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Noémie Ndiaye and Lia Markey, eds., Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World (ACMRS Press, 2023), http://hdl.handle.net/10079/f6d04e2a-8550-416e-a579-0338587ae3eb.
• 2
  For more on the plastic utopia of Barbie Land, its particular social construction and the possible relationship of consumer goods as a force for change see Kathryn Reklis, “The Barbie Conversation,” The Christian Century 140, no. 10 (2023).

This replication of form, these multiplicities of presence and presentation of the figure of Barbie and the Virgin across time, dimensionality, material, and scale, alongside the fluid dynamic between material expression and framing forms found across all the nodes of this Constellation offer a jumping off point of connectivity which allows us to think about how matter shapes meaning, and how material can affect understanding and knowing. From the crystal wombs of the Katharinenthal figures which present a mystical window to the Divine; to the hybrid figures of Montgomery’s crystal Marys which move toward an obscure eschaton, prioritizing both the fractal geode and the framing figure of the iconic Madonna, now recognized solely by her gesture and her mantle, to Fritsch’s monumental figures merging souvenir/apparition and singular/multiple, to the figures (re)made by Kane and Chamaillard which allow iconic religious figures to merge with icons of popular culture—all of these ask us to think about what we know, what we see and how we are invited to look.

The iconic status of these figures is paramount—they, as the Virgin, are both of and beyond the human and the earthly, but they, as replica, as repetition, as reconstruction, as product and production are much closer to earth. Perhaps it is this drawing closer, a phenomenon enhanced and exaggerated in many cases by the materiality of these objects, that is so beguiling. Intimacy and invitation, who is looking at whom, and who is allowed to look where is a core facet of the intercessory votive objects which are the root of these constellated objects. Control of the gaze, and access to/through the material is fundamental, but is also echoed in the later (sub)versions used for contemporary socio-political commentary on consumer culture. How we see these figures, and how we see through them is vital, both in terms of how they exist as individual works in the world, but also in terms of how they exist and communicate as replicated, cloned, multiplied, conversational sets of self and other—as explored here. After all, as Jes Fernie noted in her description of the response to Fritsch’s Madonnenfigur, displayed in the urban environment of Münster, Germany in 1987: “most adults passing the sculpture could look the Madonna in the eye,” (Fig. 13) an intimacy and mode of encounter afforded by the replica, which brings it ever closer to the (imaged and imagined) real.1

• 1
  "LONELY, PERSISTENT, DAMAGED, LOVED: Katharina Fritsch, Madonnenfigur, Münster, Germany, 1987," Archive of Destruction (blog), n.d., http://hdl.handle.net/10079/012f2b07-153a-4403-a757-6ac311e5ad9b.

Devotion to folk saints and miraculous images is little concerned with salvation of the soul or with amending one’s ways to lead a more virtuous Christian life. It is rather concerned almost exclusively with petitioning sacred power for purposes that range from fulfillment of banal desires to resolution of life-threatening crises. It is a practical, goal-directed, utilitarian devotion; a survival strategy; and a resource enhancement realized through collaboration with a sacred patron. Miracles are petitioned above all for health-related matters, but also for matters concerning employment, family, pregnancy and childbirth, romantic love, education, migration, and agriculture, among others. Folk saints and miraculous images assist with passing an exam, crossing a border, healing a wound, surviving a war, getting out of prison, kicking an addiction, preventing a separation or divorce, finding lost pets and livestock, and enhancing self-esteem. Petitions thrive in social contexts characterized by deprivation and vulnerability, poor access to basic social services (including education and health care), a loss of trust in institutions and government, and a sense that it would take a miracle to survive this inhospitable world.1

Petitionary devotion is structured by an exchange that the votary proposes to a folk saint or miraculous image. The process begins with a problem or need for which the votary seeks miraculous resolution. In what is sometimes referred to as a votive or spiritual contract, the votary makes a request together with a promise to reciprocate. The promise (or vow) commits a votary to this reciprocation. The promises are conditional; the votary is not obligated unless the miracle is granted. Requests for miracles are made in oral or mental prayer (often accompanied by a petitionary offering), in written petitions, on inscribed offerings, and with symbolic miniatures (body parts, homes, livestock) that represent a desired outcome. An emotional space opens between the petition and the anticipated miracle. One waits and hopes, and as time passes one might reiterate the petition and make interim offerings or additional promises to evidence a seriousness of purpose. Miracles are contingent on faith, but faith exercised through concerted engagement and pursuit. Petitionary devotion is a way of anticipating proactively.

Votive practice in the Americas has Indigenous, Christian, and syncretic origins that contribute to the diversity of offerings, as do social class, gender, age, and region. An Indigenous villager might offer produce or feathers; an urban adolescent a schoolbook; a return migrant dollar bills; and a mother the hair of a newborn. Some of the traditional offerings to Mexico’s Cristo Negro de Otatitlán are similar to those made to a pre-contact deity worshipped in the area prior to conquest. These include corn, pumpkin seeds, eggs, and chile ancho. Also in Mexico, Indigenous devotees to the Virgen de Juquila give wheat, corn, and seeds. At some shrines, harvest offerings are made. 

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  See, for example, Manuel M. Marzal, Tierra encantada: tratado de antropología religiosa en América Latina (Lima: Editorial Trotta, 2002), 375, where saints are sources of miracles rather than life models; Anna M. Fernández Poncela, "De la salvación a la sobrevivencia: la religiosidad popular, devotos y comerciantes," Dimensión antropológica 13, no. 36 (2006): 134, 136, and 167-168; María J. Rodríguez-Shadow and Robert D. Shadow, El pueblo del Señor: las fiestas y peregrinaciones de Chalma (Toluca: Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, 2000), 176-177; Yolanda Lastra, Dina Sherzer, and Joel Sherzer, Adoring the Saints: Fiestas in Central Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 28; and Isabel Lagarriga Attias, "Participación religiosa: viejas y nuevas formas de reivindicación femenina en México," Alteridades 9, no. 18 (1999): 72.

  In psychology, see, for example, Robert A. Emmons, "Is Spirituality an Intelligence? Motivation, Cognition, and the Psychology of Ultimate Concern," International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 10 (2000): 3, where "There is an intimate connection between religion and goals"; and Kenneth I. Pargament and June Hahn, "God and the Just World: Causal and Coping Attributions to God in Health Situations," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 25 (1986): 203-204, where experiment subjects "turn to God more as a source of support during stress than as a moral guide or as an antidote to an unjust world," and God is "one source of reassurance, support, and encouragement" to help people endure stress.

  See also Rodney Stark, "Micro Foundations of Religion: A Revised Theory," Sociological Theory 17 (1999): 268; and Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 6.

  This Constellation is illustrated with photographs taken during fieldwork in Mexico and Argentina, but the analysis in the text applies more broadly to Spanish America at large.

The offerings that votaries promise are based on the presumption that folk saints and miraculous images, because they are like us, value what we value. It is taken for granted that they desire attention, recognition, deference, popularity; that they enjoy visits and recognize the sacrifices made on their behalf; that they are flattered by the lavish and bejeweled accoutrements, by the processions and overpopulated fiestas; and that they appreciate the offerings—candles, car parts, hair, used clothing, amateur art—made to them. When votaries and priests are asked why offerings are made publicly rather than simply giving thanks in prayer, they almost exclusively respond that offerings are testaments to a saint’s or an image’s miraculousness. By sharing the miracle with others new devotion is inspired, new petitions are made, and, in turn, miracles proliferate. The public offering is publicity.1  The highways of Argentina have votive roadside shrines dedicated to the folk saints Gaucho Gil and Difunta Correa, and these shrines likewise spread the word to passersby far from the centers of devotion. Difunta Correa and the Peruvian folk saint Sarita Colonia are also promoted when trucks that bear their names and images, like mobile billboards, travel nationwide.

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  See André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 452-453, where “the act of the donor was also a piece of propaganda.”

Votive offerings are motivated in part by a desire to inform others of a granted miracle, but also to demonstrate that a particular folk saint or miraculous image is more miraculous than others in a competitive market. In this context, a primary objective is testimonial: “In proof of the miracle”; “in testimony of such a great miracle”; “I make public testimony”; “I dedicate the present offering in testimony of her great miracles.” A probative intent is suggested too by uninscribed offerings that are made as much to document a successful petition as they are to reciprocate and give thanks. Common are official documents (visas, job appointments, admission letters, licenses), educational documents (diplomas, transcripts, grade reports), and medical documents (test results, x-rays, ultrasound images). Other documents include those pertinent to payroll, civil disputes, criminal trials, prison release, and missing persons. At some sites wedding announcements are offered.

The votary’s commitment is binding after petitioned miracles are granted. The promise or vow (voto) is followed by the votive offering (ex voto). The Spanish phrase used to describe this reciprocation, pagar la manda, denotes the idea of paying up, of canceling a debt or fulfilling an obligation, and suggests the degree to which miracle transactions are based on this-worldly protocols. Common material offerings include photographs, homemade collages, textual offerings (letters, miracles narratives, plaques), clothing, hair cuttings and braids, votive candles, flowers, and milagritos (tiny metal representational offerings). Votive gifts and practices often combine in a votive complex that might include a pilgrimage or shrine visit, prayer, and a gift accompanied by a handwritten expression of thanks, all of which together fulfill the vow. A woman helped through a difficult pregnancy might enter the shrine on her knees, present the newborn, and leave a photograph, hair cutting, and narrative of the miracle she received.1

Often there is a relationship between a folk hagiography and the offerings that are made to the saint. Folk saints who died in childhood, like miraculous images of the Christ child, are offered toys, stuffed animals, and sometimes school notebooks. In Peru, the skeletal folk saint Niño Compadrito is one of a few Peruvian images that are believed to be growing. Some devotees explain that Niño Compadrito once preferred childlike offerings—toys and candy—but now, all grown up, prefers pisco, cologne, cigarettes, and miniature casinos (he likes to gamble).2   The story of Difunta Correa’s death by dehydration while lost traveling in the desert is commemorated today by offering bottles of water. Eventually Difunta Correa became a patron of travelers, both on the road and “on the difficult roads of life,” as it is worded in a prayer, so car parts, tires, and license plates are offered. Car parts are also the principal offering to another folk saint in the region, Taxista Caputo, who was a taxi driver murdered by a passenger.

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  I borrow the concept of votive complex from Hugo van der Velden, The Donor's Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of Charles the Bold, trans. Beverley Jackson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 212.
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  Regarding Niño Compadrito’s growth, see Abraham Valencia Espinoza, Religiosidad popular: el Niño Compadrito (Cuzco: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1983), 29. The offering preferences are from Takahiro Kato, “Historia tejida por los sueños: formación de la imagen del Niño Compadrito,” in Desde afuera y desde adentro: ensayos de etnografía e historia del Cusco y Apurímac, ed. Luis Millones, Hiroyasu Tomoeda, and Tatsuhiko Fujii (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnography, 2000), 162 and 177. Toys were also once a common offering to San La Muerte. See José Miranda Borelli, San La Muerte: un mito regional del nordeste (Resistencia, Argentina: Editorial Región, 1979), 35.

Flowers are a generic offering usually unrelated to hagiographic narratives but at some shrines—especially Sarita Colonia’s—the role of flower offerings becomes more complex. Through prolonged contact with Sarita’s tomb, bouquets absorb sacred power, as does their vase water, and these supernaturally charged flowers are gifted to visiting devotees. Such distribution serves the purposes of clearing the way for new bouquet offerings and of making Sarita’s sacred power portable. Water is also taken by some devotees to sprinkle in their homes and businesses and on their ailing body parts. One of Sarita’s sisters used flower petals and the vase water for healing rituals at the shrine. Recycling in another form occurs at the Difunta Correa shrine, where wedding gowns donated as votive offerings are lent to other devotees. The recipient enjoys the double benefit of the spared expense and of the wedding ceremony blessed by the presence of the Difunta-infused gown. 

Most votaries reciprocate miracles expeditiously. A conscientious sense of urgency is intensified by fear of punishment for unfulfilled promises. Some votaries believe the consequences include death but generally the punishments are more moderate (accidents, broken bones, illness, things go badly) or entail reversal of the miracle (restored sight reverts to blindness). Cautious votaries avoid the folk saints who have reputations for harsh punishment—notably Argentina’s Difunta Correa and San La Muerte—for fear that failure to reciprocate might result in more harm than gain. Difunta Correa is described as muy pagadora (she grants miracles abundantly, delivers on her end of the bargain) but also muy cobradora (she expects what is due to her and punishes delinquent reciprocation). 

Shrine visits, including pilgrimage, are in themselves and as components of votive complexes the most common form of maintaining relations with a folk saint or miraculous image. Roadside shrines and regional chapels provide opportunities for devotion without distant travel. Visits have multiple purposes: to fulfill a promise, express gratitude, make a material or textual offering, make a new petition, request forgiveness, enact faith, recharge faith, attend mass, make a confession, be in proximity of or contact with sacred power, get blessed with holy water, acquire relics, participate in fiestas, socialize with other devotees, and generally immerse in the sacred ambience. Other nonmaterial offerings include ritual dance, fiesta sponsorship, and penitential sacrifices, such as walking on one’s knees up the main aisle of a church. Especially on Good Friday, some Difunta Correa pilgrims approach the shine on their knees or crawling on their backs, even without shirts, to offer a sacrifice like their God and their saint. Similar penance is done daily on the stairway to the hilltop shrine at the complex in San Juan. Much the same occurs at the Niño Fidencio shrine in Mexico, where devotees roll in the dirt uphill from the shrine entrance to Fidencio’s tomb at the summit. The purpose of such sacrifice is to make an extraordinary gesture in reciprocation for a miracle or else to offer advance proof of commitment, of devotion, before requesting a miracle or while awaiting a response.

Less frequently votaries repay miracles with personal or social improvements (be a better husband, abstain from an undesirable behavior, reconcile with an enemy) and charitable deeds to help others in need. The last of these is particularly apparent at the shrine of Sarita Colonia, where gratitude for miracles is expressed by sharing with co-devotees. On feast days votaries bring prepared foods and other gifts to distribute among the crowd. During a two-day feast at a domestic San La Muerte shrine in Posadas the owners distribute huge quantities of food to poor neighbors waiting in long lines. Hundreds of pounds of grilled beef and side dishes are distributed, alternating every nine years with a traditional Argentine stew. The poor who attend are treated as special guests, the shrine owners explain, because they are not treated kindly elsewhere. In nineteenth-century Mexico charitable food redistribution had a different structure. Each guild offered to the Virgen de Talpa a sample of what it cultivated or fabricated, and afterward the offering was distributed to the poor. A ranchers’ guild, for example, offered beef cattle that were brought to the church door for ritual presentation and then to the main plaza for slaughter and distribution.1

Even votaries who are barely literate make an effort to textualize petitions. Their reasons for doing so underscore their preference for material immediacy and for interpersonal, humanlike relations with a folk saint or miraculous image. Petitions are written and posted at the shrine, as a sacristan put it in reference to the Cristo Negro de Otatitlán, “so that he sees them.” The same is sometimes registered in the text itself: “for you, read it my Lord.” Petitionary objects and practices are likewise intended to be seen by a saint or image. 

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  Regarding the ranchers, see Manuel Carrillo Dueñas, Historia de Nuestra Señora del Rosario de Talpa (Talpa de Allende, Mexico, 1962), 233.

Textual offerings—both petitionary and votive—range from graffiti, inscriptions on photographs and objects, and improvised notes on paper scraps to plaques, typed and framed narratives, and carefully crafted miracle testimonies. Newspapers and church bulletins provide other opportunities for textual announcement of miracles. Votive texts are also occasionally written on lengths of ribbons known as listones. This practice is used primarily in widespread Mexican devotion to Saint Charbel Makhluf, whose outstretched or bent arms gradually become covered with the ribbon petitions hanging over them. At the Gaucho Gil shrine in Mercedes ribbons are also prominent. In miraculous-image devotion, votaries use ribbons for petitions and offerings to the Señor de Chalma, including in the caves and on trees above the shrine. Ribbons also appear at the Virgen de los Remedios basilica and at the Santuario del Señor del Sacromonte in Amecameca, among other sites. Objects, notably baby clothes, are also inscribed with petitions. A small wooden truck offered by a child reads, “Take care of my dad, who is a tractor-trailer driver.” On the roof of a model house offered at Chalma the votaries wrote, “We ask that you give us the good fortune of having a home.”

Inscribed objects communicate a message with two voices, one implicit and the other explicit, a dual narration with one voice echoing off the other. The meaning of the objects and the meaning of the words engage dialectically, and the composite signifies differently and more forcefully than would the same message written on paper. “Thank you” on paper is a weak formality compared to “thank you” on a cast removed from an infant’s leg. Collage texts likewise echo off the material offerings that accompany them.

Miracles are also petitioned using uninscribed objects that represent desired acquisitions. Such representative objects are implicitly narrative—protect our cows, help my business, my infant daughter is sick. In Oaxaca miniature models of houses, children, vehicles, livestock, and other desired acquisitions are used to make petitions to the Virgen de Juquila. Devotees fabricate these at home (of wood or cardboard) or, usually, on site at a pedimento (from the verb pedir, to ask for) using the clay-rich dirt there. Wooden miniatures of houses and cars are sold for the same purpose. Petitions to the Señor de la Columna, likewise in Oaxaca, are made with plastic miniatures. Votaries also use miniature peso-bill reproductions to petition income. At the Difunta Correa complex the hillsides sloping downward from the grotto are covered with small-scale models of the homes and businesses that were acquired in response to miracle petitions. 

A wide range of other implicitly narrative objects are offered to folk saints and miraculous images. Crutches, hospital wristbands, and casts represent a hardship that the votary overcame with miraculous assistance. The same is true of the shackles and manacles offered in previous centuries. Some objects represent an accomplishment: wedding gowns, musical recordings, sports jerseys from the winning team. The larger Argentine folk-saint shrines—of Difunta Correa in San Juan and Gaucho Gil in Mercedes—have museums of extraordinarily diverse offerings. All of these objects are tangible proof and narrative testimony; each tells a story about a votary and the miracle that he or she received. I used to need these crutches but thanks to you I don’t anymore, so I offer them as a token of my gratitude.

Milagritos also narrate an implicit story—my arm hurts—as they represent not merely an arm but an arm in pain, or a healed arm no longer in pain. A votive body part is not a static reproduction in miniature but rather is the material vehicle of an abstraction (pain) and an intention (petition, cure). This investment is similar to the votive purpose that makes a baby shoe more than a shoe and the sacred presence that makes a miraculous image more than an inert work of art. In Spanish America today milagritos are mass produced of inexpensive metals and are available in a range of representations beyond the more traditional body parts, sacred hearts, and kneeling votaries. Current offerings include couples, pregnant women, livestock and poultry, crops, houses, books, and vehicles, among others. At many shrines milagritos are arranged in ornamental patterns or to spell an image’s name. 

The votive offerings known as retablos were originally painted on cloth or sometimes wood by professional artists and, given the expense, were offered by wealthier votaries. Retablos became affordable for popular use around 1825, when Mexican folk artists began painting on inexpensive tinplate. Retablo painters worked by commission and shared the votaries’ religious culture. The intent of the paintings was more devotional than artistic, and the works were generally unsigned. For centuries commissioned retablos were a predominant form of votive offering in Mexico but today their use is infrequent, due primarily to the availability of less expensive alternatives Some votaries follow the traditional retablo format—a painted scene over a textual narration—in homemade offerings of varying styles and qualities, but far more common are free-form votive artworks created in paint, colored pencils, markers, pastels, and crayons. Occasionally images are computer generated or made by techniques like woodburning, embossing, and crochet. At most churches the retablos that once covered walls have been discarded, stolen, or sold. A few churches, such as the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores in Soriano, have retablo museums.1

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  On retablos see, for example, Elin Luque Agraz, Los relatos pintados: la otra historia, exvotos mexicanos (Mexico City: Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm, 2011); Elin Luque Agraz, El arte de dar gracias: los exvotos pictóricos de María del Rosario de Talpa (Mexico City: Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm, 2014); and Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey, Miracles on the Border: Retablos of Mexican Migrants to the United States (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995).

In addition to their other functions, such as gratitude and reciprocation, many offerings that are metonymies (closely associated with the votary) or synecdoches (a part of the votary that represents the whole) perpetuate one’s presence at the shrine. Clothing, particularly children’s clothing, is a common offering in this regard, as are necklaces, bracelets, and headbands. Hair offerings are highly overdetermined, because their basic votive functions are compounded by presence (the offering is part of one’s body) and again, particularly when braids are offered, by sacrifice: “I am here offering you with affection that which I so much love.”