The photographs included in this Constellation were taken during the research for Frank Graziano’s book Historic Churches of New Mexico Today, which will be released by Oxford University Press on April 1, 2019. Hundreds of additional photographs from the project’s fieldwork are available to researchers at the University of New Mexico’s Center for Southwest Research in Albuquerque.

***

The architecture of New Mexican village churches is often described as vernacular, which is to say that the construction materials (adobe, stone, vigas, latillas) are local; the design reflects local taste, tradition, and resources; the construction standards are idiosyncratic, pursuant to the experience, inclinations, and skills of the builders; and the finished product represents the history and cultural identity of the community.1 In broad view the style of the adobe churches is an adaptation of Pueblo Indian building methods to Spanish and Franciscan technologies, designs, and religious purposes.

San Francisco in Ranchos de Taos, completed around 1815, is one of the outstanding accomplishments of this tradition. The apse has massive buttresses and a sculptural quality that has been interpreted by a roster of photographers and painters. Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Laura Gilpin, and Georgia O’Keeffe are perhaps the most prominent, but other artists include members of the Taos Society of Artists in the early twentieth century and the amateur photographers who now capture the image daily.

The intrigue is largely a response to the anomaly of the buttresses. As George Kubler already recognized in 1940, “the function of the buttressing could be satisfied with less material in more commonplace shapes” and “the buttressing seems to satisfy certain formal rather than structural needs.”2 The purpose of the buttresses, that is to say, seems more aesthetic than functional, and the apse has the feel of an enormous folk art sculpture. This aesthetic value is further enhanced by the imperfections, curved corners, soft lines, undulations, changing shadows, mud cracks, perching birds, and the fringe of rocks that keep parked cars from getting too close. The apse is voluminous and rustic but also graceful, with a sense of harmony to its disproportion.

Another quality is the church’s relation to the earth of which it is made. As Ansel Adams put it, “The massive rear buttress and the secondary buttress to the left are organically related to the basic masses of adobe, and all together seem an outcropping of earth rather than merely an object constructed upon it.”3 The church seems more emerging from the earth than superposed on it, and the effect of this earth/sculpted-earth coherence recalls Aristotle’s idea that art completes nature. The organic integration also extends to the church’s environs—the plaza, the sky—which seem part of the composition. The plaza and the sky serve as a kind of niche into which the church is situated, and that situation—together with the history and cultural knowledge that we bring to our viewing—provide a sense of completion in which the church’s beauty is fully realized.4 As one scholar put it, in a separate context, “the space around the sculpture is part of that sculpture.”5

This effect is particularly apparent when we view an isolated rural church. The sculpture (church) and the backdrop (landscape, silence) seem to fuse into a single perceptual experience. The continuity of church and landscape together commands our attention subtly with its serenity. Ruins also have this sculptural quality, especially when they are stone. The abandoned buildings seem giant sculptures against the dramatic backdrops of sky, mountains, deserts, cliffs, and valleys. Symbolic values tend to consolidate on such buildings—churches, ruins—but even landscapes are repositories for histories, memories, and cultural meanings. When we look across a valley we may see only grass, trees, cows, and distant mountains, but superimposed over the scenery are the invisible layers of centuries of everyday experiences, subsistence struggles, joys and sorrows, good times and hard times, traditions and rituals that are imperceptible but cognitively present. Our knowledge of a place’s past informs what we see presently and contributes to our emotional response.

The aesthetic appeal of adobe churches is also affected by synesthesia (the mixing of sense perceptions). The surface of the adobe seems at once visual and tactile, with a visual sense of texture and—paradoxically—smoothness. The solidity seems not rigid but rather soft and malleable, with a swell, and sometimes gives the impression that it might be pliant and yielding to the touch. We perceive the church’s volume and mass, its weight, as these come through the sueded surface and visual warmth. The holiness and devotion inside emanate outward, not perceptibly but cognitively through the knowledge and sometimes faith that is inherent in perceptions.

Villagers adapt the most fundamental resource—dirt—into homes and churches when they build with adobe, and human imagination thereby molds the external world along the contours of an internal sense of culture-in-place. This is how the world we build should look as it conforms to who we are and the knowledge and skills and aesthetic by which we adapt resources to our purposes. The emotions and attachments that people feel toward their churches are not evoked by a building’s physical presence alone, however pleasing it might be, but also by each church as the locus and repository of the investments made there, of the meaningful personal and communal experiences based there, and of the presences, including divinity, represented there.

• 1Vigas are ceiling beams made from debarked tree trunks and latillas are saplings, branches, willow, or split cedar arranged above and across the beams, at right angles or in diagonal patterns. The roof is completed and the ceiling is insulated by a layer of dirt above the latillas.
• 2George Kubler, The Religious Architecture of New Mexico in the Colonial Period and Since the American Occupation (Colorado Springs: The Taylor Museum, 1940), 45.
• 3Ansel Adams, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs (New York: Little, Brown, 2004), 91.
• 4Regarding the sculpture in the niche of its surroundings, I am following Rainer Maria Rilke in F. David Martin, Sculpture and Enlivened Space (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981), 185.
• 5Martin, Sculpture and Enlivened Space, 28.

San Antonio was built around 1930 in Alamillo, a village of the southern Río Grande valley. The church is a mission of San Miguel parish in Socorro.

Permission to build Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria, known today as Our Lady of Purification, was given in 1844, after the Doña Ana Bend Colony land grant was finalized in 1843. The church was expanded in the early 1860s and was comprehensively restored between 1987 and 1999. The town where Our Lady of Purification is located, Doña Ana, is about five miles north of Las Cruces.

Immaculate Conception, in the town of Casa Colorada, is a mission of the Tomé parish by the same name. The church was built in 1949 with a design reminiscent of earlier constructions.

St. Augustine is located in Isleta Pueblo, about fifteen miles south of downtown Albuquerque. It was first built as a Franciscan mission in 1612-1613 and dedicated to San Antonio de Padua. The church was burned during the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, rebuilt after 1710 by incorporating what remained of the original structure, and rededicated to St. Augustine. The current church is the result of a comprehensive, sixteen-month restoration that was completed in 2011.

San Rafael is located in the Mora County village of La Cueva. The church was originally built between 1862 and 1870 under the direction of a French priest, Father Jean-Baptiste Guérin. The French influence made San Rafael unique among the adobe churches of the region, with gothic windows, a high ceiling, and an upward elegance. The church was comprehensively restored in the 1990s.

San Francisco de Asís, in the former mining town of Golden, was built in the 1830s, restored or rebuilt on the original foundation around 1918, and redesigned and again restored by Fray Angélico Chávez in the early 1960s. Decades later, after the town had been largely depopulated and the church had fallen into disrepair, a local family saved the church from ruin with volunteer labor and donated materials.

Santa Rosalía, in the foreground, is located in the village of Moquino, near Laguna Pueblo. The structure behind the church is the village’s Penitente morada.

San Isidro chapel, completed in 1952, is in Taos.

The apse of San Francisco in Ranchos de Taos has massive buttresses and a sculptural quality that has been interpreted by a roster of photographers and painters, notably Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, Laura Gilpin, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Annually during the first two weeks of June the church is resealed with adobe mud by parishioners and volunteers. San Francisco was originally completed around 1815.

St. Patrick was built in the early 1930s on the Mescalero Apache reservation, near Three Rivers. The construction was initiated and directed by a Franciscan, Father Albert Braun, who also built St. Joseph Apache Mission in Mescalero.

San Antonio is located in a rural area known as El Macho, about seven miles north of Pecos. The one-room sandstone chapel, covered now with stucco, was probably built in the mid-nineteenth century.

San Agustín (also spelled Augustin and Augustine) is a mid-nineteenth-century church located in a mostly depopulated village in the Gallinas River valley south of Las Vegas, New Mexico.

San Antonio de la Ladera is a hilltop family chapel accessed by a rugged stairway, in Chimayó.

The Santuario de Chimayó is a major international pilgrimage site. The chapel is flanked on the left side by a room of votive offerings that leads to a pocito, where holy dirt is gathered.

San Acacio in the village of Golondrinas is one of the sixteen mission churches of St. Gertrude Parish in Mora.

This essay was commissioned by the Columbus Museum of Art to appear in Reflections: The Columbus Museum of Art’s American Collection (Columbus: Columbus Museum of Art in Association with Ohio University Press, Athens, 2019). We publish it here with permission from the museum.

Like any number of legendary self-made Americans, Elijah Pierce was born in a log cabin.1 His particular cabin was located in Baldwyn, Mississippi, an area known for its logging industry. Pierce grew up on the land his father farmed (a plantation belonging to Lee Prather) and was well acquainted with the surrounding woods. At eight or nine years old, Pierce learned to carve under the tutelage of his uncle Lewis Wallace, his mother’s brother. “When I was a boy I was always carving,” Pierce said. His favorite Christmas gifts were pocketknives, the tools of his pastime and art.

From boyhood Pierce maintained a peculiar kinship with wood. Over his long life he attributed to it a number of significant capacities. Importantly for him, his work in wood connected him to people and people to each other. He noted his practice of investing his woodcarvings with prayers and good wishes whenever he gave them away, sending out blessings that inhabited the medium and its artistic treatment in his hands. He was confident in the power of the wood to contain and communicate his story and his history.

Obey God and Live (Vision of Heaven) is Elijah Pierce’s personal conversion narrative. In this piece of wood he depicted the definitive episode of his own spiritual autobiography, an event in his past that he understood to (re)organize, interpret, and frame his entire life. In selecting this material form to narrate the transformation he believed God elicited from him, Pierce gave tangible testimony to his convictions. He represented himself as the subject of divine intervention. He set his life inside the bounds of an authoritative sacred history. Elijah Pierce— within his own specific Afro-Protestant and Black Masonic contexts, his very name signaled his place in a biblical and prophetic genealogy.2

More than any other single image that Pierce carved, Obey God and Live (Vision of Heaven) represented, for him, the moment that most specifically and persuasively set out his destiny and vocation. In this carving, he brought the themes and cadences of Christian scripture and homiletic practice to bear upon the circumstances of his own existence and perspective. He showed that this miracle happened to him. He demonstrated how he was, in the process, touched directly by the large brown hand of God. 

Pierce pictures this literal, tactile connection in his carving. He used gold glitter, relative scale, and placement within his composition to call the viewer’s attention to the space where the hand of God, issuing forth from a funnel-shaped energy field of light, comes into contact with Pierce’s own head. He would look back later and note that he had been marked since birth as a prophet or seer, as one with a religious vocation. He was born with a caul, relatives told him—a “veil,” he called it—that portion of the amniotic sac that sometimes covers a newborn’s head, interpreted from ancient times as a sign of calling, of being set apart for sanctity or prophecy or greatness of some other sort. In the world of earthly pleasures this kind of expectation can be burden as well as blessing.

• 1I am indebted to Melissa Wolfe of the Columbus Museum of Art for helpful consultation. I am also grateful to Michael Hall for an illuminating telephone conversation of June 20, 2011, as well as the content of his interviews with Elijah Pierce, provided to me in transcription by the Columbus Museum of Art. In the final editing of this manuscript, Anastasia Kinigopoulo, Assistant Curator, Columbus Museum of Art, provided invaluable assistance with content.
• 2For a compelling study of earlier, more broadly social uses of history-making and sacred storytelling among African Americans in the United States, see Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past: African American Race Histories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Obey God and Live, for all its apparent organizational simplicity, is sure and powerful in its narrative clarity. The story thread begins as Pierce joins his mother Nellie for the evening’s family bible reading (Fig. 2). The main event, occupying almost two-thirds of the surface of the board, concerns a stark choice: for or against obedience to God. This Pierce signified in the two books (labeled “Holy Bible” and “Sears Roebuck”) on the table between the representation of himself as a young man and the carved relief figure of his devout mother. In the common vocabulary of the period, this juxtaposition of Christian scriptures and a catalogue of appealing goods for sale might be expressed as a confrontation between “the Good Book” and “the Wish Book.” That the choice is his alone Pierce indicates by having the titles of both volumes face his direction. He underscores his responsibility and agency in his long reach across the table, over his still-closed bible, to the catalogue full of attractive new items for purchase. That his believing mother assists God in leading her son toward the right choice is beautifully narrated in the choreography of hands circling the white tabletop on the left side of the carving. Pierce’s open right hand in his lap and his mother’s left hand cradling her own open bible at her waist together bracket and anchor the tableau around the table. The placement of hands simultaneously focuses the viewer’s attention on the gentle but firm confrontation ensuing behind the lamp, as Nellie holds down the corner of the catalogue to dissuade Elijah from grasping it. One of Pierce’s older sisters looks on. A kind of witness figure, she stands with elbows jutting out (unseen hands planted firmly on hips). The Vs formed by her collar and arms provide directional cues, identifying the principal human protagonists and giving further visual emphasis to the weight of the mother’s gesture. We see five brown hands around the table. The fifth one, the largest and brownest, belongs to God, the hand of power and presence in Pierce’s rendition.

The right third of the image provides important details of the story (Fig. 3). The smooth curve of the back support of Nellie’s chair, simulating an elegant open parenthesis, leads the eye to the action. Like the pages of a book, this image reads from left to right and top to bottom. In the vignette at top right, Pierce, having chosen catalogue of fanciful goods over recitation of religious obligations, falls stricken as though dead to the floor, his body supported by the older sister in her two-tone (blue over purplish-red, slightly metallic) dress. In the final figural scene at lower right, Pierce’s body is laid out on a bed, doctor consulted and undertaker called. All this happens in the presence of a cloud of witnesses, the floating faces of neighbors, mostly gazing full-on at Pierce or looking out, in shock and incredulity, into the viewer’s space. Four figures in profile mark the image’s right margin and concentrate the story’s punch by closing the parentheses opened by the back of the mother’s chair. 

We, the viewers, join this crowd of faces, rounding out the circle of spectators. Pierce, the artist, provides only one figural clue to the happy ending of his autobiographical Christian morality play. Narrative resolution hangs on a child, a smile, and the color red: we take our cues from his youngest sister’s hopeful expression, as she stands in the foreground, white ribbon in her hair, at the head of the bed. Her bright-red dress points back across the panel’s surface to its visual bookend in the less saturated red carved text at left: “Obey God and Live.” And live Pierce does, his sense of self, looking back, changed forever by this moment of divine intervention. Pierce understood this narrative as a miracle story more than a tale of judgment, though miracle and judgment are not antithetical here: “Obey God and live!” is but a short (though important) step away from “Obey God or die!,” as Pierce implied when he said, “I was laid out for dead once by not doing what the Good Lord told me to do.”1

From a psychological and spiritual perspective, in the midst of the conflict suggested between Good Book and Wish Book, this is a story of liberation, an assertion of the possibility of transformation, personal and social. Having a story, especially one manifested in material form that invites repetitive handling, viewing, and recitation, provides a way of organizing and getting hold of life’s uncertainties. Elijah Pierce may feel pulled in two directions, but he controls this story. He relates a narrative he understands as truth and he testifies to this accomplishment. As maker of the narrative, he has creative voice and authority: this is his image, his framing, his interpretation of events. Pierce tells a story of obedience to God, but as both subject and narrator of the story—as one who “knows” the outcome—this is in fact his “vision of heaven,” as the subtitle he selected asserts, his vision of power and life. Far from being subject to the crowds of white model consumers pictured in his Sears Roebuck catalogue, he answers here only to God. 

Obey God and Live is about choice and will as well as obedience, about choosing the Good Book with its lasting spiritual rewards over the Wish Book with its glossy fleeting material promises. While he found the world of goods and parties attractive, Pierce depicts himself casting his lot with the God whose powerful dark hand anointed him just as surely as it recalled to mindfulness his religious obligations. In this woodcarving God’s hand descends in rebuke and consecration. This is a conversion story and a resurrection story. Pierce understood this visionary event as a demonstration of God’s sustaining and renewing expectations in his life. 

Elijah Pierce located the production and circulation of his woodcarvings in a rich network of social activities and events. He sometimes carved alone, but more often worked in his Long Street barbershop, between clients and during conversations with them. Carving was an industrious pastime. It usefully occupied hands in times between people needing haircuts. In the process, it operated as meditative exercise, social network, personal memory, entertainment, devotional activity, and social commentary. Wood was a multifaceted medium for Elijah Pierce. His was a kind of performance art lodged in the routine of his daily life. He made space to exhibit many artworks, densely populating with relief carvings and three-dimensional figures-in-the-round the walls and surfaces of his shop’s duplex, a mirror image second room immediately adjacent to the first, with barbershop and art gallery occupying space under one roof. This set of practices with respect to his work in wood gave him ample opportunity to articulate, recollect, and reinterpret, over and over again, the stories manifested in his art. For Pierce, church (the Gay Street Tabernacle Baptist Church) and workplace (the Long Street Barbershop and Art Gallery) were not distinct sacred and secular spaces, as some have suggested, but rather two interwoven locations of personal devotion and conviction. His rooms on Long Street combined religious display with popular whimsy. Pictures of Jesus and of cigar-smoking, card-playing canines lived comfortably in a single space, each inflecting the other. In the barbershop, and in demonstrations of his artwork elsewhere, he acknowledged the power of this extra-ecclesiastical mixture: “I can get to a lot of people who don’t go to church, and change their lives.”2 He repeated, with singular frequency, the life-defining story pictured in Obey God and Live. The image remained in Pierce’s personal possession, on display in his barbershop. He never copied the carving; in fact, he generally declined to copy any of his images, believing that the pictures belonged to a particular vision, as revealed to him in a particular piece of wood. After the artist’s death in 1984, the Columbus Museum of Art acquired this carving from his estate.

When Elijah Pierce talked about Obey God and Live (Vision of Heaven), he consistently remarked that God had commanded not simply that he read the bible but that he read a “certain passage of scripture in St. Matthew,” somewhere “around the 16th chapter,” he recalled. While it is difficult to pin down precisely what might be meant by “around the 16th chapter,” it seems worth noting, given Pierce’s interest in “signs,” that Matthew 16 begins with a request that Jesus show a “sign from heaven” and moves from there to a declaration of Jesus as messiah. The chapter’s near-conclusion is perhaps most relevant to the experience Pierce pictured in this vignette, to his admission that he reached first for the Sears Roebuck catalogue, with its pages and pages of earthly goods, when God told him to read first the bible: “For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?” (Matthew 16:26). Pierce says as much in fewer words: “Obey God and Live.”

Much might be said about the specific sensory and material capacities of Pierce’s medium, about the kinds and qualities of the wood he selected, the tools he used to carve into it, the tactile experiences of working with it, the ways different grains and differently sanded surfaces felt to the hand, the smells (of sap and shavings and paint and varnish) it introduced to his home and barbershop. From a visual perspective, wood offered Pierce a particular set of characteristics as well. The one that arrests my attention at this moment concerns relations among media and color, and especially between this medium and the range of possibilities presented for skin color. Wood, unlike bleached paper products made from wood pulp and fibers, naturally appears in a range of beiges and browns. The most common and immediately available alternative media for inexpensive figural religious devotional and domestic decorative objects set a much lighter base standard. Chalkware, for example, like the bisque and parian wares and the more expensive kinds of porcelains and marbles they imitated, was, on its own gypsum-derived terms, the starkest of whites. When left unpainted in areas representing skin, or when merely coated in clear varnish, as was often the case, the default color was white, the “natural” base tone of the medium. In the context of twentieth-century racism and race relations in the United States, and when replicated over and over again in church and school and home and missions field, these objects (in medium as well as decoration) instantiated whiteness as the “usual” color for skin, human and divine—and this was especially the case in Christian educational and devotional pictures and objects. 

Wood offered a different set of “natural” possibilities, and Elijah Pierce’s practice with respect to treatment of these surfaces suggests that he recognized these implications and pursued them. Medium thus took on an important, and literally substantial, narrative content. Pierce either painted the skin of his figures in a range of light to medium browns (often approximating the color of the wood itself, once varnished) or left faces and arms and hands unpainted, covering them only in varnish and letting the brown tones of the wood, accentuated by the darkening of aging shellac, represent skin color. While there are exceptions, Pierce’s figures can be taken to be dark-skinned, even when contemporary audiences thought they “knew” the figures to be white, as in the cases of Jesus or Abraham Lincoln, for example. Pierce’s representation of the ideal Universal Man (1937) made moving and sophisticated use of medium in this regard. His carving of the historic 1937 boxing match between Joe Louis and James Braddock shows the two fighters with the same varnished but unpainted wood skin tone, even though contemporary press and populace seemed determined to focus almost exclusively on the men’s racial difference.3 The medium Pierce used provided him with the opportunity to set “natural” or “neutral” skin tone in a darker shade of brown than the “neutral” or “natural” standard of porcelain or plaster or marble. The color that Pierce’s medium “naturalized” conformed to darker skin with greater facility than to pale. In Obey God and Live he underscored this commitment in his decision to render God’s hand in richest brown. He accomplished this by varnishing this area but letting the wood’s own natural (and naturalizing) brown show through.

In the 1930s and 1940s (two decades or so before the 1956 date he later affixed to Obey God and Live, but years after the transformative event it represented) Elijah and Cornelia Pierce took his carvings on the road, traveling to county fairs and churches and other available venues to engage in what they called “sacred art demonstrations.” In an interview he elaborated: “Every piece of work I got carved is a message, a sermon. Preacher don’t hardly get up in the pulpit and preach but he don’t preach some picture I got carved. My [second] wife and I did a lot of travel with those pictures…. Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, and back to Columbus. People would ask me to comment on this picture, what that one means. My wife could talk about them near as good as I could. We never sold any tickets to our program, but everywhere we’d go, the program’d pay our expenses…”4 His work could also be viewed in their home, by appointment, and at his barbershop.

The broadsides that the Pierces and others produced to advertise these religious art displays, at home and on the road, cast the work in the common genre of objects performing important roles in American domestic missionary activity and Christian education. From the eighteenth century to the present, Christian individuals and institutions used a wide variety of pictures—large and small, handmade and manufactured, and in many media—in evangelization efforts. “BEHOLD! The Man Who Carves His Sermons In Wood” proclaimed one poster (Fig. 4), with the text situated as a masthead or title for a photograph of Elijah and Cornelia, in church vestments, preaching his sacred artwork. The many pieces displayed in the photograph include a Last Supper that Pierce fittingly carved into one of Cornelia’s breadboards (“This is my body broken for you, take and eat,” says the Jesus of Christian scripture and liturgy, in blessing and consecration, over the bread on the table before him). Pierce proved himself to be an effective material and performative interpreter of ritual and biblical vocabularies and phrasings. The broadside’s “behold the man who carves,” while overtly alerting potential audiences to the times and places of traveling displays, also wielded added weight and authority for biblically literate audiences in its iteration of an assertion concerning the story of another woodcarver of sorts, the story of Jesus the carpenter and his Passion: “Ecce Homo,” “Behold the Man.”    

Another broadside, likely dated between 1944 and 1947 (Fig. 5), advertised work exhibited by appointment in Pierce’s home, exclaiming:

LOOK: It’s Your Chance to See The Mammoth Sacred Art Demonstration. Possibly one of the most interesting and inspiring features of the great work that is done by Rev. Mr. & Mrs. E. Pierce. Their unique Biblical and Educational Art exhibit, portraying many Biblical Characters and events; all having been accomplished with an ordinary pocket knife and chisel. You cannot afford to miss seeing the great masterpiece The Book of Wood, Portraying THE LIFE OF CHRIST. Open for appointment at 144 Ever[e]tt St. Columbus, Ohio.

Of his vocation as evangelist, Pierce said: “After running from the ministry for 20 years every time I refused to preach, He [God] made me carve it. As my wife told me, ‘God made you preach every sermon in wood.’"5

• 1From interview transcription in Elijah Pierce: Wood Carver, exh. cat., Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, November 30–December 30, 1973.
• 2Mary Bridgman, “Primitives Keep Pierce Perking,” Columbus Dispatch, November 13, 1977, 1-5.
• 3See Nannette V. Maciejunes and E. Jane Connell, “Secular Sermons: Elijah Pierce, Woodcarver,” Timeline (a publication of the Ohio Historical Society), May/June 1993: 7.
• 4Caroline Jones interview with Elijah Pierce, n.d., quotation is from second page of transcript.
• 5Quotation is from a transcription provided by Columbus Museum of Art, header reads “Elijah Pierce: Sermons in Wood,” [4].

The forms of Pierce’s religious and moral narrative works, and his modes and venues of display, ingeniously combine two families of period Protestant evangelizing and devotional arts.  First, when he and Cornelia took his work on the road, they generally attached individual carvings to larger portable walls or storyboards and publicized these traveling displays in broadsides of the sort already described. They thus put his sacred art into a pattern of circulation and religious educational and missionary consumption that also included such things as bible panoramas, large-scale figural displays sculpted of wax or other media, pictorial performances preachers and others called “chalk talks,” and “magic lantern” narrative light shows. Second, as separate, discrete objects, and thus in a smaller scale (Obey God and Live measures a bit over a foot high and just shy of two and a half feet wide), Pierce’s carvings resembled the scripture plaques, mottos, and testimonies marketed as devotional signage, pictures and texts in many media (wood, chalk, cardboard, plastic, metal) for use in home and church.

In whatever ways historians might categorize Pierce’s work, however, the artist himself emphasized the proximity between its material presence and its performance as story. As an object, Obey God and Live integrated Pierce’s own story with the biblical story just as it placed itself as a communicative sacred thing over against the mutely demanding commodities offered in the Sears Roebuck catalogue. For most of his long life Pierce did not sell his carvings but displayed them, performed them, preached them, lived with them, gave them away. Not intending to sell them, he often did not sign them. As late as mid–November 1977, Obey God and Live did not bear its central signature and date. Sometime within the last six or seven years before his death in 1984, Pierce applied these to his long-completed composition (which, based on style, was probably carved almost a decade earlier than the 1956 date upon which he settled). He most likely added name and date in response to mounting demand for his work, which in the early 1970s began to receive notice as “art,” as work commoditized for the market rather than as the creative production he performed for other personal, social, and religious purposes. Adding signature and date transformed the work under the new stress and expectation brought to it by external and limiting categorizations like “outsider” and “folk.” Still, Pierce held the piece out of commercial circulation, retaining possession of it through the end of his life.  

Obey God and Live is the one work among Elijah Pierce’s woodcarvings that most succinctly expresses his own sense of self and sacred obligation. In this piece of wood he visualized the thesis he chose for his own life story. The question Pierce raised most explicitly was not whether he and, by implication, other Christians should deny themselves the pleasures of Sears Roebuck. The overt issue was this: When God commanded that some other activity be undertaken first, the “wish books” of the world should not interfere with obedience to God’s command. Whenever he was offered the opportunity to expand, Pierce maintained that the principal content of obedience to God was “love ye one another.”1

Pierce’s repeated textual references to Matthew 16 in relaying the significance of this story, however, indicate that he experienced some degree of personal tension in the particular set of options represented by the two books (bible and catalogue). This was not simply an event of the past but a present choice, one that required daily iteration and assent throughout his long lifetime.2 The story had a happy ending, but it retained, in the narrative loop of repeated retelling and in the object’s central material and visual place in his everyday life, a durable charge, a register of anxiety. Pierce understood the tale’s outcome to be positive, but the process and sequence of passage through “time,” in one vignette after another and in each telling or recollection, carried the remembered weight of something looking a lot like death before, as Pierce would say, “I came back just like I went away: like the sun comin’ from behind a cloud.”3

• 1See Gaylen Moore, “The Vision of Elijah,” New York Times Magazine, August 26, 1979: 30.
• 2I owe this observation to Michael Hall, telephone conversation, June 20, 2011.
• 3Quotation from transcript of audiotaped interview with Elijah Pierce, by Michael Hall, Macarthur Benyon, Nancy Brett, Fall 1971.

This series of images, taken over the course of six months, documents the street altars dotted around Mexico’s dense, urbanized capital, home to over twenty-one million people. I first noticed the altars on my early morning commute. Walking to the Metrobús from my home in Colonia Escandón to travel to the south of the city, I was struck by the little flickering lights on street corners that pierced the darkness. After this I began to notice altars everywhere I went: on the sides of roads, in parks, markets, and shops, next to taxi stands, outside metro stations, by street food vendors, and on top of phone boxes. I discovered them in the affluent neighborhoods of La Condesa and San Ángel and, more commonly, in poorer areas of the city such as Doctores, Tláhuac, and Tepito.

The never-ending stream of people, traffic, and noise in big cities creates a sense of anonymity, especially for foreigners.  The sprawling, chaotic metropolis of Mexico City can create a feeling of invisibility. The street altars, existing as part of the urban landscape of the city, stand in contrast to this detachment. Although only on very seldom occasions have I seen people interact directly with the altars, they feel to me to be individual and deeply personal, each has its own distinct character. I have never seen a defaced or vandalized altar. On the contrary, the altars are beautifully maintained, decorated with fresh flowers, lit candles, electric lights, and tinsel. Little figurines, framed prints, or prayer cards of the Virgin of Guadalupe or San Judás Tadeo (Saint Judas Thaddaeus) are most commonly found inside the altars. Sometimes curtains made from velvet or netting hang in front of the altars. In some cases stars and flowers are painted on the walls behind them.

By talking to some altar tenders, I discovered the enormous pride taken in caring for them. In a mechanic shop on José Martí Avenue in Colonia Escandón (just south of La Condesa), Jacob described how he and the other workers care for the altar dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe that sits up high on the back wall of the large workspace (Fig. 1). They take turns cleaning the altar and buying fresh flowers for it every fifteen days. He tells me that the red nochebuenas (poinsettias) and the yellow crisantemos (chrysanthemums) that decorate the altar are a symbol of Mexico. For Jacob, Guadalupe symbolizes the mother. He loves and gives thanks to the altar of Guadalupe in the same way that he would to his mother, “bringing flowers, cleaning it, crossing myself in front of it is all about giving thanks."1

Further down José Martí Avenue, the men working in the Hidrosina gas station call over their colleague Judith Caballero who—along with two other workers—is responsible for taking care of the gas station’s altar (Fig.15). She tells us that every Tuesday one of the altar’s three tenders cleans it and buys flowers for it at the market. It is then that same person’s responsibility to take care of the altar for the week. Judith tells us that the altar used to sit in the office upstairs but she decided to bring it outside so that everyone could see it. Judith prays to Guadalupe every day, giving thanks for everything in her life and making requests to the Virgin, such as for her health or for good grades for her children. “She is my mother,” says Judith of Guadalupe, “mine and of all of the Mexican people.”2

• 1“Desde traerle flores y mantener su altar limpio; hasta persignarse todos los días antes de comenzar mi día, es mi manera de darle las gracias por todo.” Jacob (mechanic) in discussion with the author and translator, Victor García, 8th October 2018.
• 2Ella es mi madre, literal, mía y la de todos los mexicanos.” Judith Caballero (gas station worker) in discussion with the author and translator, Victor García, 8th October 2018.

***

Mexico is home to the second largest Catholic population in the world—ninety-six million Catholics live in Mexico, almost eighty-five percent of the country’s population.1 Mexican Catholicism is specific in that it encompasses and absorbs local practices and reflects Mexico’s particular history. Religious symbols, rituals, and meanings have been infused with influences of pre-Hispanic, Nahua culture. The legend of the Virgin of Guadalupe exemplifies the presence of older traditions in Mexican Catholicism. According to the legend, in 1531, the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego, a neophyte Indian, and spoke to him in Nahuatl on the hill of Tepeyec—the same place pilgrims came to worship Tonantzin, the Aztec goddess of fertility and nurturing. Images of the Virgin of Guadalupe also bear physical features that have been interpreted as non-European. Her brown skin has drawn similarities to Tonantzin, one of the many goddesses worshiped by the Aztec people. Today, Guadalupe is not just a religious icon but has become an important symbol of Mexican identity.2

Mexican Catholicism reflects not only Mexico’s past, but also the country’s current political and social context. Cults of devotion to saints and images of the Virgin or Christ are common forms of practice, from local or regional saints to ones venerated on a national level. After the Virgin of Guadalupe, the image most frequently found in the street altars is of the green-and-white-cloaked San Judas Tadeo (Saint Jude), known globally as the patron saint of lost causes. Since the 1980s, disenfranchised urban youth in Mexico City have adopted San Judas Tadeo as their own, often referring to him as the patron saint of “gangsters” or a “narco-saint.”3 Similarly, worship of La Santa Muerte, the folk saint of death, has surged in popularity in the last decade, especially amongst marginalized sectors of society. Devotion to La Santa Muerte is said to be the fastest growing new religious movement in the Americas.4 As Jennifer Scheper Hughes describes, the rise in popularity of these so-called “narco-saints” has occurred within a context of religious and social upheaval, including the institutional dismantling of liberation theology and the Mexican church’s turn to the right, as well as the country’s decade-long drug war, which has brought extraordinary violence to many communities in Mexico.5

***

These altars, which punctuate the urban landscape of the city, form part of Mexico’s rich, religious visual culture. On the one hand, they perform a traditional apotropaic function by protecting spaces from danger, both physical and supernatural. As María Ana Portal, professor of Anthropology at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico, describes, the altars are believed to prevent evil spirits from hurting people.6 I have also found altars to be particularly common in traditional places of “danger,” especially connected to transport, such as gas stations, mechanics, parking lots, bus stations, and on the sides of busy roads.

But their presence also reflects the fallout from rapid urabn development in the city in the past decades. According to María Ana Portal, the growth, inequality, and urbanization of the city, as well as the market liberalization of the economy over the last fifty years, have complicated traditional ideas of belonging. As a result, she argues, public altars are a way of appropriating—giving meaning to—the public sphere in a time of chaos, insecurity, and instability. Described by Portal as the “symbolic sacralization of the public sphere,” altars are not just symbols of communal memory—a connection between the past and present—but form boundaries and forge a sense of belonging in the modern, globalized world.7

• 1“Catholics in Mexico and Cuba,” Pew Research Center, last modified March 1, 2012, http://perma.cc/343D-KK52.
• 2David Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1-12; Jeanette Favrot Peterson, “The Virgin of Guadalupe,” Art Journal 51, no.4 (1992), 39-47; Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014); William B. Taylor, Theater of a Thousand Wonders: A History of Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 173. For a more detailed discussion on the role of Guadalupe in Mexico, in particular her complex role as both a symbol of national unity and dissent, see Jeanette Favrot Peterson, “The Virgin of Guadalupe,” 39-47. For a history of shrines, imagery, and sacred space in colonial Mexico see William B. Taylor, Theater of a Thousand Wonders.
• 3Jennifer Scheper Hughes, “The Niño Jesús Doctor: Novelty and Innovation in Mexican Religion,” Nova Religion: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 16, no. 2 (2012), 5.
• 4See Andrew Chesnut, Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017).
• 5Jennifer Scheper Hughes, “The Niño Jesús Doctor,” 5; Jason M. Breslow, “The Staggering Death Toll of Mexico’s Drug War,” Frontline, July 27 2015, https://perma.cc/REW5-5XCM..
• 6María Ana Portal, “Las creencias en el asfalto. La sacralización como una forma de apropiación del espacio público en la ciudad de México,” Cuadernos de antropología social, no. 30, (2009), 71
• 7“La sacralización simbólica del espacio público.” Ibid., 66, 73.

In her Object Narrative about François Aubert’s iconic Carte-de-visite Photograph of Maximilian von Habsburg’s Execution Shirt, Eleanor Laughlin describes vividly both its intimate and its wide-reaching allures (Fig. 2). As she explains, the carte-de-visite had political and commemorative powers “offering the living both visual and tactile connections to the deceased.”1 And, even as an object of mourning, it offered a broad international public access to this major political event. But even more than this she writes, it also “functioned in the Mexican religious context as a relic or object of reverence.”2 In The Resolution of the Suspect (Fig. 1), photographer Miki Kratsman builds on the reliquary nature and the transitive qualities of the carte-de-visite, creating a diptych: the historic image on one page of the centerfold and his own photograph of the bloody garment of a single unnamed Palestinian martyr on the other.3 Kratsman asks if a “Christian reverence for relics” might interrupt the pervasive indifference to Palestinian suffering in the present.4 He asks why it is so difficult to call attention to the violence that is contemporary Palestinian life and death under Israeli occupation. Not only does he build on the indexical nature of photography and its relation both to mourning and commemoration, Kratsman taps into the promise of contemporary photography as reliquary.

• 1Eleanor A. Laughlin, "Carte-de-visite Photograph of Maximilian von Habsburg’s Execution Shirt," Object Narrative, in Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (2016), doi:10.22332/con.obj.2016.1
• 2Ibid.
• 3Miki Kratsman and Ariella Azoulay, The Resolution of the Suspect (New Mexico: Radius Books/Peabody Museum Press, 2016).
• 4Ibid., 151.

As Laughlin explains, articles of clothing can absorb sacred presence, as in the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, transferred directly onto the cloak of Juan Diego, “saturating the cloth with the visible presence of the divine.”1 The carte-de-visite itself took on this reliquary function in remembrance of the executed emperor. The Resolution of the Suspect offers a range of haunting images about the horrors of Israeli occupation; as Kratsman’s collaborator and scholar of visual culture Ariella Azoulay explains in her introduction to Kratsman’s work, Kratsman’s photographs tell a terrible tale about “the drama of portrait-making in circumstances wherein certain people—an entire population of individuals—are doomed to appear under the resolution of the suspect.”2 Although Kratsman’s photographs include images of Palestinians marked for abuse and often death, the book centers on targeted subjects, shuhaded, martyrs whose stories can only be told, in some instances, through the soiled garments left behind.3

Kratsman’s diptych offers starkly contrasting images. The execution documented by the Aubert photograph was a major public event. It elicited responses from around the globe and resulted in significant consequences for the governance of Mexico. The photograph itself, as Laughlin points out, became part of this event and served as both a trophy and an object of mourning. By contrast, the Palestinians executed by Israelis often live and die in relative anonymity, commemorated only by their families and their communities through martyr posters.4 The global attitude towards Israeli aggression against Palestinians is largely one of apathy, and Palestinians themselves are disillusioned by the failure of so many images of suffering to garner international empathy, much less bring about change. Where Maximilian was a famous colonial emperor, the Palestinian referred to in Kratsman’s photograph, like all of those depicted in his book, are unknown, powerless over the fate of their lives and their homes.5

Kratsman’s color print appears at the center of the left side of the two-page spread.  It depicts a level of violence that the carte-de-visite does not. The historical shirt is hung neatly, stoically, in sepia tones against a simple backdrop; the contemporary garment is distended, the fabric pulled in opposite directions. The quiet solemnity of the carte-de-visite contrasts with the too-bright flash in the Kratsman photo. The angle of the composition is awry as if done in a hurry.6

Kratsman carefully placed the two photographs together within the pages of his sketchbook, and then added his English annotations in bright red marker, re-photographing the open double-page spread. He barely annotated his own photograph. Just above it he wrote in capital letters “Late Photography,” a reference to the concept of the “late photograph,” an idea developed over the past decades to describe photographs taken in the aftermath of tragic events, which furnish evidence of violence, but offer minimal commentary.7 Here too there is no commentary. Even Azoulay neglects to mention this diptych in her introduction. Instead, this late photograph simply suggests the fate of all the other Palestinians depicted in this book.

The carte-de-visite occupies the opposite page, carefully reproduced. Its sepia tones echo the aging blood that stained Maximilian’s once-white shirt a rusty brown. These colors contrast sharply with both the contemporary photograph and Kratsman’s fresh red annotations. This text runs not only above the image of Maximilian’s shirt but also along its side, disturbing what is otherwise a more formal composition. In capital letters, Kratsman wrote, “Although Aubert wasn’t allowed to photograph the actual execution, he at least managed to document the 'scene of the crime’ afterwards . . .”8 An additional text runs down the inside seam of the page. To read this text one must turn the book ninety degrees or twist one’s head to see the words clearly. There, in the same shaky handwriting, Kratsman wrote, “In the tradition of Christian reverence for relics, Aubert placed the Emperor’s shirt in the center of his composition.”9 And Kratsman, echoing Aubert, placed this diptych in the center of his book.

Although the notion of the contact relic articulated by Laughlin originates in a Christian legacy of the reverence for objects and their representation, the allure of relics is much more pervasive.10 Part of what made the carte-de-visite of Maximilian’s shirt so powerful was an abiding sense of the sacred nature of both clothing and its representation as holders of vital matter. In the case of the carte-de-visite, the “portrait-like representation of the shirt” itself suggests, as Laughlin makes clear, “a transfer of power from the actual shirt to its image.” Kratsman’s overt invocation of this reverence brings the late photograph into contact with this legacy.

Describing Aubert’s nineteenth-century photograph, art historian Graham Smith writes, “Pinned to the crossbeam of a window, the shirt is presented like the target it was, and forms a bleak, artless image whose main purpose seems to be to inventory the bullet holes.”11 And yet, it is much more than this. Smith himself draws connections between the carte-de-visite photograph and not only the Emperor’s own self-fashioning as a martyr but the Christian iconography of the photographer. Smith shows how Aubert’s image draws on seventeenth-century Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán’s famous depictions of saints. In reference to one of these paintings, The Martyrdom of Saint Serapion, Smith writes, “Because Serapion’s head and hands are almost completely hidden in shadow, the habit becomes a surrogate for the saint and represents his martyrdom in much the same way that Maximilian’s shirt signifies the emperor’s execution” (Fig. 3).

• 1Laughlin, "Carte-de-visite Photograph.”
• 2Kratsman and Azoulay, The Resolution, 25.
• 3As he began work on this project in 2011, Kratsman explained that he wanted to “explore how Palestinians appear to the eye of the beholder, whether that person is a passerby, a newspaper reader, or an Israeli soldier.” He planned to include a cluster of different photographic interventions. Images of “Palestinians as targets, shot with a lens used by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) unmanned aerial vehicles,” isolated “images of those identified as shahids or martyrs as portrayed on neighborhood posters or placards,” as well as images made in the spirit of “Francois Aubert's photograph of the shirt of Maximilian, ruler of Mexico, just after his execution in 1867” featuring “the last piece of clothing worn by a Palestinian before he was killed.” And finally, the book was to include what became a field study on Facebook where Kratsman revisited many of the photographs he has made over the past 33 years of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. This project would ask “Palestinians to mark his photos to indicate who is ‘wanted,’ a victim, or a shahid,” identifying those captured in the background of some of those photographs. perma.cc/4GLK-SV4L. It should also be noted that in this description the website uses the English form of the plural of “shahid” and not the Arabic “shuhadeh,” I thank one of my anonymous external readers for pointing out this error.
• 4On these posters, see Laleh Khalili, Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), doi:10.1017/cbo9780511492235
• 5I thank one of the anonymous readers of an earlier version of this essay for the eloquent phrasing of this assessment.
• 6I again thank one of the anonymous readers for this important assessment.
• 7Kratsman and Azoulay, The Resolution, 150. On late photographs, see Simon Faulkner, “Late photography, military landscapes, and the politics of memory,” Open Arts Journal, no. 3 (2014), doi:10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2014s22sf Faulker writes that late photographs "are photographs that picture material remains left in the aftermath of events that often involve forms of violence. These photographs are usually high in detail, but formally simple, framing aftermath sites in ways that suggest the reservation of judgment and commentary upon the things they picture.” See also, David Campany, “Safety in Numbness: Some remarks on the problems of ‘Late Photography,’” in Where is the Photograph? ed. David Green (Photoworks/Photoforum, 2003). Online at: perma.cc/LS7B-C5XJ
• 8Kratsman and Azoulay, The Resolution, 151.
• 9Ibid.
• 10On the notion of the contact relic see Scott Montgomery, “Contact Relics,” in Encyclopedia of Medieval Pilgrimages (2012) doi:10.1163/2213-2139_emp_SIM_00235 As Montgomery describes, the term “contact relic” can describe, “two entirely different classes of relics”: secondary and/or tertiary relics. Montgomery writes, “Secondary relics are items that came into contact with a saint during his or her lifetime, such as the tunic of Francis Assisi. Tertiary relics are items that have come into contact with relics and thereby absorbed some of their power, becoming another form of contact relic, such as the strips of cloth (brandea) that were touched to the tombs of saints.” As Montgomery explains, this touching allows the power of the holy to spread.
• 11Graham Smith, “Francois Aubert’s Shirt of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico,” History of Photography 16, no. 2 (1992), doi:10.1080/03087298.1992.10442542, 172. I am also reminded of Pasolini’s bloody shirt. See Ara H. Merjian, “The Shroud of Bologna: Lighting Up Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Sensational Corpus,” in Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practices, ed. Sally M. Promey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 447-458.

Kratsman’s explicit invocation of this Christian tradition serves as a connective tissue between the two portions of the diptych and his broader project. Together these conflicting images, an aging relic of an Emperor and the portrait of the jacket of a contemporary Palestinian shahid, ask us to reconsider this “reverence for relics.” What might it mean, Kratsman asks, to see this work in light of the Christian tradition of veneration that Laughlin and Smith each describe? By giving new life and new urgency to this legacy, Kratsman attempts to speak to a contemporary global audience about violence, vulnerability, and political power. His recirculation of the carte-de-visite challenges us to ask who gets to be a martyr and what a contemporary martyr looks like.

The author wishes to thank Emily Floyd for her deft editorial work on this essay. She is also grateful to Ruth Ost and the two anonymous readers for their suggestions and critical engagement.