[News Motion] In the summer of 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd, Kelly Latimore, a white artist who grew up surrounded by images of a white Jesus, decided to make a course correction. He’d paint the Virgin Mary and Jesus with gold halos encircling their heads — and both would be Black.Also, his image of Jesus would resemble Floyd, a Black man who had been killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
The painting, titled "Mama," attracted little notice in February after a copy was installed at the law school of the Catholic University of America in Washington. But in November, The Daily Signal, a conservative website, published an article about the work and about the university’s recently published report on diversity and inclusion, and students created a petition calling for its removal. That month, the painting was stolen.
The university replaced it in November with a smaller copy — the school’s policy was "not to cancel speakers or prevent speech by members of the community," the university’s president, John H. Garvey, said in a statement after the theft — but now that copy, too, has been stolen. And the student government has passed a resolution calling for further displays of the work on campus to be banned, citing religious objections.
The debate over whether a private institution has the right to display or remove work that some students find offensive is one that has rippled across the country in recent years. In 2019, students at Mary Baldwin University, a private liberal arts college in Staunton, Virginia, objected to an art exhibition in a university gallery that included Confederate imagery. The show was closed within 48 hours of its premiere. And earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that Vermont Law School could cover two murals that some students considered racist.
While Garvey had initially defended the decision to display the work, he apologized in a statement Monday for the "confusion" the painting had created and pledged to think carefully about how to replace it. (An investigation into both thefts is ongoing, the university said.)
"Many saw the figure in the arms of Our Lady as a divinized George Floyd," the statement said. "This interpretation led to accusations that the work was blasphemous, something that is contrary to the respect due God and his holy name. Regardless of your interpretation, it created needless controversy and confusion, for which I am sorry."