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“I feel the need for new images (new icons),” writes Kelly Latimore, a self-taught St. Louis artist who began painting as a member of the Common Friars, a monastic order in the Episcopal Church. He has taken up the brush to explore issues of faith and justice, placing himself “in the patterns of the old images and yet making new images.” In Refugees: La Sagrada Familia, he draws on his experience of meeting a young immigrant who spoke of his travels through the desert and across the border to arrive in the United States.

The painter and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) was best known for writing biographies of artists, which were compiled in nine volumes. But Vasari was an accomplished artist himself, and among his many achievements was the renovation project for Santa Croce in Florence, to which he contributed several paintings, including his rendition of the day of Pentecost. Vasari follows artistic convention by depicting the Spirit as a dove along with descending beams of light. Mary occupies her traditional location in the center of the scene, representing the church.

“Much of my work is concerned with incongruity,” writes Texas artist Alice Leora Briggs. Using sgraffito on kaolin clay, she offers narratives that both instruct and confuse. She is tender in her renderings of humanity and clear about the inhumane ways people treat and label one another. She is especially drawn to the “narco-battered borderlands” of Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, near El Paso, Texas, which for her is suggestive of other kinds of borderlands that humans experience.