wfn.org | Painting of Dark-Skinned Jesus Wins Magazine Contest

[PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>]

16-December-1999 
99428 
 
    Painting of Dark-Skinned Jesus Wins Magazine Contest 
 
    National Catholic Reporter "updates" image of Christ 
 
    by Religion News Service 
 
WASHINGTON - A painting of a dark-skinned Jesus has been chosen as the 
winner of the National Catholic Reporter's contest to update the image of 
Christ for the year 2000. 
 
    The magazine calls the winning image a "more gentle Jesus ... modeled 
on a woman" rather than the muscular male image of the Renaissance. 
 
    The work of the winner, Janet McKenzie of Island Pond, Vt., was 
considered the top choice from 1,678 entries from 1,004 artists in 19 
countries. 
 
    "`Jesus of the People' simply came through me," she said in a 
statement.  "I feel as though I am only a vehicle for its existence." 
 
    The independent newsweekly based in Kansas City, Mo., launched the 
competition to counter the hype about millennium parties and computer bugs 
and turn the focus to Jesus, on whose birth the date is based. 
 
    "Jesus of the People," which garnered the $2,000 first prize, was 
chosen by Sister Wendy Beckett, an art expert who has hosted a BBC 
television series. 
 
    "This is a haunting image of a peasant Jesus - dark, thick-lipped, 
looking out on us with ineffable dignity, with sadness but with 
confidence," she wrote of the winner. 
 
    Michael Farrell, editor of the newsweekly, commented on the meaning 
behind the painting: "When the church was overwhelmingly a Western 
institution, we in the West made Jesus in our likeness," he said. "But now 
at last Christianity has spread to the ends of the Earth as the founder 
once prayed it would. 
 
    "Much of the church's energy, and new vocations, have moved from Europe 
and the U.S.A. to the Third World, so perhaps this work of art is a preview 
of how Christianity will flourish, and what kind of divinity it will look 
up to, as the next millennium unfolds." 
 
    Entries for the contest ranged in artistic media from oil to cloth to 
computer creations to burnt toast.  They depicted Jesus as a carpenter, a 
clown, and a death-row inmate and placed him on television, dancing in the 
streets of Jerusalem with an Arab, and sawing down his own cross. 
 
    Sister Wendy acknowledged choosing one image was a challenge. 
 
    "Let me emphasize that each of these works truly speaks of Jesus to our 
age," she said.   

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