Yesterday the U.S. officially marked 100,000 deaths from COVID-19. The clinical detachment of that number masks a staggering loss of individual lives, a cutting short of vibrant stories. It has also encouraged a conversation about communal grieving and acts of memorial, asking how our present moment is like, and unlike, previous collective experiences of loss from war, terrorism, and illness.
We at MOCRA don’t pretend to have any great insights, but we do believe in the capacity for art to carry us past the limitations of speech in articulating our grief, fear, confusion, and anger, to remind us of the power of empathy, compassion, and solidarity. This can be especially true of art that emerges from an engagement with the spiritual and religious dimensions: art rooted in the fertile soil of wisdom found in the world’s faith traditions, or shaped by the discipline of ritual, spiritual, or artistic practices; art that taps into a treasury of images and themes that speak across time, geography, and culture.
Don’t Mourn, Consecrate, by Juan González (1942–1993), was likely the first work of public art to deal with AIDS when it was displayed in the street-front windows of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University in 1987. Quoting Hans Holbein’s sixteenth-century painting ”The Dead Christ in the Tomb,” González invites us to confront the frailty and vulnerability of our bodies. Then, as now gathering clouds evoke the looming, still unfolding impacts of a deadly virus.
In its original installation, the work was accompanied by a scroll on which the cumulative tally of AIDS deaths was updated weekly. Photos from 1987 show the numbers growing by tens and hundreds. When MOCRA displayed the work in 2009, the numbers were growing annually by the millions.
González was no stranger to the ravages of AIDS, and ultimately died from complications related to the disease. Yet his artwork might encourage us to transmute our present mourning into something more profound, to consecrate our losses by recognizing the humanity behind each one of those 100,000 deaths, then rededicating ourselves to compassionate and tangible care for our fellow humans, to solidarity and community beyond partisan or national divides.
David Brinker
Director, MOCRA
Museum of Contemporary Religious Art 
[…] At the end of May, I wrote: […]