Art Exhibitions

Jacques Jarrige: Christ Sculpture

Artist Jacques Jarrige will install a 10-foot tall sculpture of Christ made of hammered aluminum 90 feet in the air in the center of the Cathedral's nave. It will be shrouded as is customary during Lent and unveiled for the start of Easter before the evening Mass of April 16, 2022.

Zip Code Memory Project: Imagine Repair

The Zip Code Memory Project has partnered with the Cathedral to celebrate the power of community and care in neighborhoods unequally affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Following several months of creative workshops engaging participants from across Upper N.Y.C. Zip Codes, the exhibition and performances express a collective desire for renewed hope, connection and transformative justice.

Neal Slavin: BELIEF

In The Prayer Project, photographer Neal Slavinexplores the fundamental need of people to gather together and connect spiritually in order to face things beyond their understanding. Slavin has depicted such occasions in many ways and in mostly sacred spaces, photographing different prayer styles and customs around New York City. His interest is in the private spiritual experience captured on each face in a crowd of hundreds or even thousands, that moment of personal transcendence that can only be accessed as part of a larger community.

Where Do We Go From Here?

This is the question posed in the first billboard of the public art project at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, running along 110th Street between Amsterdam and Morningside Avenues. Set against the backdrop of a border fence, the billboard, by artist Eric Gottesman, asks the viewer to place themselves in the position of a migrant. It also asks us to consider where we are going together as a nation, and where divisive political language about immigration is leading us.

Produced by For Freedoms and Magnum Foundation and featuring contributions by Gottesman, Hank Willis Thomas, Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratelo, Paola Mendoza and Kisha Bari, Cinthya Santos-Briones, Susan Meiselas, and Christopher Myers, the outdoor installation along 110th Street was originally curated as part of The Value of Sanctuary: Building a House Without Walls, a 2019 exhibition and public program initiative at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine exploring how personhood and community cohesion speak to and are formed by notions of dignity, inclusion and exclusion.

The James Parks Morton Interfaith Art Collection

Throughout his career, the Very Reverend James Parks Morton, Dean of the Cathedral from 1972–1996 and a passionate proponent of interfaith dialogue, amassed a collection of over 300 pieces of religious art. Dean Morton and Pamela Taylor Morton have generously offered the collection to the Cathedral, selections from which are on rotating view.

Treasures from the Crypt

The Treasury of the Cathedral is comprised of an array of ecclesiastical items given to the Cathedral over the past 125 years. It includes many precious items, ranging from a Mexican chalice from the mid-17thcentury, to a Restoration two-handled cup from 1660, to an alms basin given to the Cathedral by King George V. These rarely-seen objects are part of the physical and spiritual heritage of the Cathedral. They are included in worship services, baptisms, and investitures: sacred events that mark the passage of the liturgical year and moments of great personal and spiritual importance.

The donors of some of the objects on view include members of the royal family of England, as well as the descendants of Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch director-general of New Netherland from 1647 until 1664 when it was renamed New York. The pieces here tell a story of community: from the origins of the Anglican Church, through the founding of the City of New York, and the chartering of this Cathedral, intended as a house of prayer for all people.