The Brooklyn Museum is at it Again

The Brooklyn Museum is at it Again

NewsMax.com
Thursday, February 15, 2001

Not satisfied with having infuriated Christians by exhibiting a dung-splattered painting of "The Holy Virgin Mary" in 1999 that was composed of cutouts from pornographic magazines and lumps of elephant dung, the Brooklyn Museum has now scheduled an exhibit including a photo in which Christ at the Last Supper is portrayed as a nude woman with her arms outstretched.

And just as it did in the case of the controversial 1999 exhibit, the Museum refuses to back down, even in the face of the heated complaints by the nation’s largest Catholic Civil Rights organization.

Curator Barbara Millstein said adaptations of the Last Supper have been done before and that she doesn't consider the Cox photo taboo.

"There are images of this scene with dogs at the Last Supper," she said, adding that the offensive photo is shown in a separate room.

"We have it in here so people can look at it if they want, or not look at it if they don't," Millstein told the New York Daily News.

The series of photographs by black artist Renee Cox, entitled "Yo Mama’s Last Supper” is nothing less than an assault on Catholicism stormed William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

"It's unfortunate that it was included in the selection," he told the News.

Cox’s photo is part of a 188-work show, "Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers," which the museum bragged is one of the largest exhibitions ever assembled of the work of contemporary black photographers.

And Cox’s blasphemous photo is not the only outright anti-Christian offering: The exhibit -"Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers," – a shocking photo by Willie Middlebrook that shows a topless woman on a crucifix.

Donahue told the News that Cox is as an "admitted anti-Catholic" who once photographed herself dressed in a nun's habit, with a nude woman kneeling in front of her.

And Cox admits that her sacrilegious photo is a direct attack on the Catholic Church acknowledging that the inspiration behind the photo was to critique the Church "and the role women don't play in it," she told the News.

"I don't think its anti-Catholic at all. I grew up Catholic,” she told the News before launching into an anti-Catholic diatribe. "Being a Catholic — they are about business. Money. I don't believe in all the philosophy and how it's set up."

"Catholics had no interest in the abolition of slavery," she said. "When you do the history, Catholics in this country were 40% of the slave owners. How do you talk about 'God is great, God is good' and all of that?"