Adam Cvijanovic b. 1960

What’s So Funny About Peace, Love, and Understanding, 2024-25

Oil and gold leaf on canvas

Commissioned by His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Adam Cvijanovic’s expansive mural reflects St. Patrick’s Cathedral’s historic role as a sanctuary for New York’s diverse Catholic community. Drawing on the Apparition at Knock—an 1879 Marian vision central to Irish Catholicism—the mural reimagines this moment as a living source of comfort and belonging, carried across the Atlantic by generations of immigrants.

Cvijanovic’s immersive composition unfolds across four sections, weaving the sacred and the everyday. Contemporary immigrants stand beside saints and civic figures—Mother Cabrini, Felix Varela, Dorothy Day, and Archbishop Hughes—while monumental angels offer the city in symbolic protection. The figures of the Apparition appear above disembarking Irish families, linking divine presence to lived experience.

Rendered in oil on canvas with areas of hand-applied gold leaf the painting draws from Baroque drama, Byzantine iconography, and modernist abstraction.

The mural is both a tribute to Catholic tradition and a meditation on American pluralism. In blurring boundaries between past and present, it invites the viewer into a sacred and unfolding story.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1960 and based in Brooklyn, New York, Adam Cvijanovic is a self-taught painter best known for expansive, site-specific works that integrate art into architectural space. His paintings often depict historical and imagined landscapes, with a focus on the relationship between place, memory, and American cultural narratives. Major public commissions include 10,000 Feet, a mural depicting the Indiana countryside for the Alexander Hotel in Indianapolis; a four-panel oil painting in the Mercedes Benz stadium in Atlanta; a 20-by-20-foot ceramic tile piece for a school in Brooklyn; and a project for the Bean Federal Center in Indianapolis, for which he has created 164 individual murals totaling more than 7,000 square feet, portraying American battlefields from the colonial period to the present. Exhibitions and commissions include a solo exhibition at The Hammer in Los Angeles and participation in USA Today at the Royal Academy in London and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, as well as exhibitions at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, MASS MoCA, Tate Liverpool during the Liverpool Biennial, the Walker Arts Center, and the New Orleans Biennial.

1. St. Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850–1917)
   First U.S. citizen to be canonized a saint; founded schools, hospitals, and orphanages serving immigrant communities.
   
   
2. Venerable Félix Varela y Morales (1788–1853)
   Cuban-born priest and philosopher; advocated for the poor, immigrants, and abolition of slavery in 19th-century New York.
   
   
3. Archbishop John Joseph Hughes (1797–1864)
   First Archbishop of New York; oversaw construction of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and defended Irish Catholic immigrants.
   
   
4. St. Kateri Tekakwitha (1656–1680)
   First Native American saint; a 17th-century Mohawk convert known for her piety, care for the sick, and deep devotion.
   
   
5. Alfred E. Smith (1873–1944)
   First Catholic major-party nominee for U.S. President (1928); four-term Governor of New York and champion of social reform.
   
   
6. Dorothy Day (1897–1980)
   Journalist and social activist; co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, which combined faith and service to the poor.
   
   
7. Venerable Pierre Toussaint (ca. 1766–1853)
   Former enslaved man from Haiti; became a philanthropist and key Catholic benefactor in 19th-century New York.

On the evening of August 21, 1879, in the village of Knock, County Mayo, Ireland, fifteen people ranging in age from five to seventy-five witnessed a silent vision at the gable wall of their parish church. The figures included the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, and St. John the Evangelist, as well as a lamb on an altar surrounded by angels. The apparition lasted nearly two hours, bathed in radiant light, yet no words were spoken.

Remarkably, the apparition occurred the same year St. Patrick’s Cathedral was dedicated in New York—uniting two sacred sites across an ocean. Unlike other Marian visions, Knock was communal, silent, and deeply consoling during a time of famine and mass emigration.

Today, Knock remains a major site of pilgrimage and prayer, a lasting symbol of spiritual resilience, and a sacred image carried by generations of Irish immigrants to new lives in America.

Commissioned at the direction of His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Adam Cvijanovic’s expansive mural for St. Patrick’s Cathedral reflects the Cathedral’s historic role as a beacon of faith and a gathering place for New York’s diverse Catholic community. The work draws its central theme from the Apparition at Knock, Ireland, a Marian vision of profound significance to Irish Catholics, while also celebrating the broader history of Catholic immigration to the United States. Rather than confining the vision to a single moment in 1879, Cvijanovic reimagines it as an enduring source of consolation and belonging, carried across the ocean by immigrants and kept alive in the collective memory of the Church. The figures of the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph, St. John the Evangelist, the angels, and the Lamb of God are not shown as distant or inaccessible but as luminous presences interwoven with scenes of migration, civic life, and devotion, emphasizing that the promise of faith remains active in the present.

Cvijanovic’s composition is conceived as a sweeping, immersive narrative that bridges past and present, earthly and celestial. Four principal groupings unfold across the walls in a sequence that guides the viewer from the human to the divine. On the left wall, contemporary immigrants are depicted in naturalistic detail, engaged in quiet gestures of conversation, arrival, and reflection. Among them are Mother Frances Cabrini and Father Felix Varela, whose lifelong service to immigrant communities anchors this section of the mural in historical continuity. The inclusion of these figures underscores the Cathedral’s role not only as a place of worship but as a sanctuary of practical care and solidarity. On the two central panels flanking the main entrance, saints and historical leaders stand in timeless space: Archbishop John Hughes, Venerable Pierre Toussaint, Dorothy Day, Al Smith, and Kateri Tekakwitha are depicted with quiet dignity, their presence a reminder that the moral and spiritual life of the Church is built on many individual acts of courage and compassion.   Above them, monumental angels stand as guardians and intercessors. One cradles the skyline of New York City in his outstretched hands, offering it symbolically to divine protection, while the other holds a firefighter’s helmet and a police officer’s cap in a gesture that honors those who have served and sacrificed. To the right, the figures of the Apparition appear above a depiction of Irish immigrants disembarking in New York Harbor, connecting the sacred vision to the lived experience of those who crossed the Atlantic in search of hope and freedom.

Executed in oil on canvas and installed directly into the Cathedral’s architecture, the mural combines references to Baroque spatial drama, Byzantine iconography, and modernist abstraction to create a composition that feels at once grounded and transcendent. The upper registers evoke the shimmering space of religious icon paintings, where gold leaf reflects ambient light and suggests the intangible radiance of heaven descending into the earthly realm. This gilded surface also establishes a visual dialogue with the Cathedral’s own ornament and the polished organ pipes that rise above the mural, creating a sense of continuity between painted image and architectural space. The lower portions of the painting draw on the theatrical realism of Caravaggio and Ribera, using dynamic gestures, deep shadow, and vivid color to convey the emotional immediacy of shared history and faith. Throughout the composition, Cvijanovic incorporates art historical references that collapse distinctions of era and place, including nods to the serene luminosity of Matisse’s Chapel of the Rosary and the psychological intensity of Francis Bacon’s reimagined papal portraits. These layers of influence are not presented as citations but as living inheritances that continue to shape how sacred stories are seen and felt.

Throughout, time and space collapse into a single, encompassing image that invites viewers themselves to become witnesses to the apparition. Angels and saints stand beside ordinary men and women; emblems of civic life are held alongside symbols of divine mystery. The gold leaf that threads through the composition is designed to shift with the movement of daylight. This interplay of light and reflection suggests that the presence of the divine is always near, waiting to be perceived. By enveloping the viewer in its layered narrative, the mural blurs the boundaries between past and present, earthly and celestial, individual memory and collective experience.

In keeping with Cvijanovic’s broader practice, the mural is both an homage to the visual traditions of European Catholic art and an inherently American work: a portrait of a living, pluralistic church that continues to evolve. It speaks to shared experiences of faith, migration, and belonging, ideals that define St. Patrick’s Cathedral as “America’s Parish Church.” With its interplay of sacred vision and everyday life, the mural affirms that each person who enters the Cathedral becomes part of this story.