Iconographer Kelly Latimore sees God in plain sight
“People asked, ‘Is it George Floyd or Jesus?’ My answer was yes.”
Kelly Latimore has seen his sacred paintings leave the church and march in the streets. In 2020, Black Lives Matter demonstrators in cities across the country held up copies of the 34-year-old artist’s icon Mama, in which a grieving Mary holds the body of Jesus after the crucifixion. It’s a familiar pietà image—except that both figures are Black, and Jesus resembles the late George Floyd, who called out for his mother under a police officer’s knee. Mary’s eyes fix on the viewer, as if asking, “What do you see? Who bears God’s image?”
Latimore, who lives and works in St. Louis, builds on the tradition of iconography in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Like his medieval predecessors, he indicates Jesus and the saints by placing golden discs, or nimbi, behind their heads. But Latimore’s Jesus isn’t European-looking, and his saints are spiritual pathfinders such as civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis, poet Mary Oliver, musician Roebuck “Pops” Staples, and trans activist Marsha P. Johnson—individuals not to worship but to emulate.
Growing up as a preacher’s kid in an evangelical church, Latimore was accustomed to a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus; it wasn’t until he went to college that he discovered a wider, richer world of Christian art. He painted—or wrote, in iconographer parlance—his first icon when he was a praying, hoeing member of a monastic farm in Ohio. When a fellow member asked what it meant to consider the lilies of the field, Latimore answered with an image of Jesus holding lilies and looking almost surprised by them.
