Past Exhibitions

Browse the chronological list of past exhibitions at the Saint Louis University Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCRA), or search for a specific exhibition. Click “View” for more information about an exhibition. If you need further information about an exhibition, please contact us.

Name

Frederick J. Brown: The Life of Christ Altarpiece

Dates

December 2, 1995 to April 19, 1996

Description

In 1992, prolific expressionist artist Frederick J. Brown offered to execute a large, multi-paneled altarpiece based on the life of Christ for the new Museum of Contemporary Religious Art. A generous gift of UMB Banks and the Crosby Kemper Foundations helped make that project a reality.

The resulting Life of Christ Altarpiece, dedicated to artist Max Beckmann, is comprised of a central triptych (depicting the Baptism, Descent From the Cross, and Resurrection of Christ), measuring over 15 feet wide; and two large side panels, depicting the Madonna and Child and the Descent into Hell, placed at 90° angles to the triptych. Through strong brushwork and brilliant coloration, Brown has created a moving visual theological reflection on the life of Christ.

Madonna and Child is the hallmark piece of this polyptych. The strong, iconic Madonna with her striking face, embraces the child Jesus, the most naturalistic of the figures in the altarpiece. The child has a gentle, melancholic expression that indicates, even at this early age, an understanding of all that is to come. In Brown’s unusual and beautiful Baptism of Christ, the River Jordan assumes the epic proportions of a large lake with a quilt-like coastline and sailboats in the background. Jesus floats horizontally on the river in the middle ground, his head supported by the standing John the Baptist. This unusual position of Jesus offers a foreshadowing of his death and entombment.

Descent From the Cross is a very narrow, tall canvas dominated by a cadaverous Christ. The crosses of the two thieves are in the background and immediately behind Christ is a golden halo. Yellow and gold in this altarpiece are signifiers of the Divine Presence. Resurrection collapses the events of Holy Week into one canvas—the Crucifixion, the Entombment, and the Resurrection. The rolled-away stone, bearing a large cross on it, reveals the cold and bloodied slab of the tomb, now empty, while to the right of the tomb the resurrected Christ in profile looks out of the corner of his eye at us.

The final panel in the altarpiece is Brown’s reflection on a subject rarely seen in modern Western art—the Descent into Hell—and it is distinguished by Brown’s return to the style of abstract expressionism that he used in the 1970s, the style which won the attention of the artist Willem de Kooning, who became an important mentor and friend for Brown. This moment in Christ’s life is more often depicted in the Eastern Churches: just prior to his resurrection, the spirit of Christ descended into Limbo and released the spirits of the important figures of the Old Testament so they could participate in the Resurrection. Christ’s spirit then rejoined his body for his own Resurrection.

For Brown,Descent into Hell has modern and even personal resonances, for in these descending spirits, there is a deeply felt understanding of what it is to look into the abyss and to be overwhelmed by the various struggles of life. Indeed, the removal of figural elements heightens the sense of vast, even limitless despair. Yet, there is also a sense of triumph over those difficulties, expressed through the spirits that are ascending. It is the culmination of a significant, modern treatment of the life of Christ.

Frederick J. Brown is one of America's finest and most prolific expressionist artists. His paintings draw on many sources: his African-American and Choctaw ancestry, the muisc and lives of jazz musicians, his religious upbringing, the folklore of the South, and the art of the German Expressionists and the American Abstract-Expressionists, especially that of his mentor and friend, Willem de Kooning.

Brown has exhibited widely throughout this country and abroad, and his paintings are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; and the White House, Washington, D.C. In 1988, Mr. Brown had the largest retrospective ever given a Western artist by the People's Republic of China, and he is the only Western artist ever to have had an exhibition at China's national museum in Tien An Men Square.

MOCRA and Saint Louis University express their deep gratitude to Frederick J. Brown and to UMB Banks and the Crsoby Kemper Foundations for making this important gift of art possible.

above:
Installation view of Frederick J. Brown: The Life of Christ Altarpiece at MOCRA, 1995–1996. Photo by Jeffrey Vaughn.

Exhibition
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A Tribute to Frederick J. Brown June 12, 2012 to August 26, 2012 Frederick J. Brown (1945-2012) was one of America's finest and most prolific expressionist artists. His paintings draw on many sources, including his African-American and Choctaw ancestry, his religious upbringing, and the folklore of the South. He referenced religious, historical and urban theme...
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Andy Warhol: Silver Clouds, an encore presentation August 27, 2002 to December 14, 2002 MOCRA is pleased to bring back Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds (1966) in an encore presentation. Mercurial and buoyant, these pillow-shaped silver mylar balloons roam the air currents of MOCRA's spacious nave gallery and respond to the touch of the viewer. Silver Clouds is a visual, aud...
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Lewis deSoto: Paranirvana April 15, 2000 to November 05, 2000 Lewis deSoto’s Paranirvana, a 25-foot long image of the reclining Buddha made of a nylon skin and inflated with air, based on a well-known Sri Lankan sculpture. Paranirvana was created especially for the 1999-2000 Bay Area Now 2 exhibition, the second in a planned series of biennial exhibitions...
Robert Farber: A Retrospective, 1985–1995 November 18, 2000 to April 01, 2001 New York artist Robert Farber turned to art in his mid-30s and pursued it until his death in 1995 at the age of 47. His work has been shown in such distinguished insti...
Bernard Maisner: Entrance to the Scriptorium November 14, 1998 to June 28, 1999 The late art historian George Kubler wrote in The Shape of Time, "[Works of art] are like gateways, where the visitor can enter the space of the painter, or the time of the poet, to experience whatever rich domain the artist has fashioned. But the visitor must come prepared: if he brings a...
Tobi Kahn: Metamorphoses March 8, 1998 to May 8, 1998 Curated by the distinguished art historian Peter Selz, Tobi Kahn: Metamorphoses brings together 37 paintings and 20 sculptures of an artist who extends an American tradition-the distillation of the natural world into elemental forms. Kahn's antecedents in landscape painting include Albert ...
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Steven Heilmer: Pietre Sante \| Holy Stones February 7, 1997 to March 16, 1997 Expertly carved in Carrara and Vermont marble, the sculptures of Steven Heilmer juxtapose raw stone with highly finished sculpted fabric. In a dramatic partnering of surfaces, the “cloth” variously presents, wraps, confines, conceals and reveals roughly hewn marble, tangibly evoking the myste...
Utopia Body Paint Collection and Australian Aboriginal Art from St. Louis Collections April 4, 1997 to July 31, 1997 A vigorous cultural revival is evident today throughout Aboriginal communities in Australia. Artists at Utopia -- a tract of Aboriginal freehold land in the central desert of Australia -- have produced some of the most vital, exuberant, and distinctive imagery of the contemporary Aboriginal art m...
Manfred Stumpf: Enter Jerusalem September 26, 1997 to December 21, 1997 Born in 1957, German artist Manfred Stumpf studied in Frankfurt, New York, and Vienna. He is a versatile artist whoo has worked in the media of drawing and painting...
Frederick J. Brown: The Life of Christ Altarpiece December 2, 1995 to April 19, 1996 In 1992, prolific expressionist artist Frederick J. Brown offered to execute a large, multi-paneled altarpiece based on the life of Christ for the new Museum of Contemporary Religious Art. A generous gift of UMB Banks and the Crosby Kemper Foundations helped make that project a reality. ...
Edward Boccia: Eye of the Painter June 30, 1996 to June 30, 1996 When appraising the long career of an artist, we tend to focus on the mature style, or the works best known by the public. Edward Boccia: Eye of the Painter seeks to render another view of the artist's career, by presenting not only the large-scale allegorical works for which Boccia is kno...
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Keith Haring: Altarpiece – The Life of Christ April 8, 1995 to May 7, 1995 Keith Haring's work is known throughout the world for its unique and immediately recognizable pictorial language. His often light-hearted art reaches beyond the confines of museums. It can be found in subways, churches, schools, on T-shirts and watches, and even at one time on the Berlin Wall. Ha...
Ian Friend: The Edge of Belief – paintings, sculpture, and works on paper, 1980–1994 May 19, 1995 to July 2, 1995 MOCRA is honored to present the first American retrospective of Australian artist Ian Friend. Common concerns thread their way through the diverse works in the exhibition: a sense of awe for landscape; an appreciation for ritualistic and protective instruments (e.g., the spears from New Guinea, t...
Eleanor Dickinson: A Retrospective August 26, 1995 to October 22, 1995 Throughout Eleanor Dickinson's work, the human form is seen as a reflection of the soul. Walter Hopps, former director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, has called Dickinson "one of the country's most powerful artists committed to figure drawing." The current exhibition presents works from three of...
Post-Minimalism and the Spiritual: Four Chicago Artists May 3, 1994 to June 27, 1994 The Minimalist movement, appearing in the mid-1960s and continuing well into the 1970s, is characterized by a reduction of forms to simple, basic geometric shapes, devoid of any ornamentation. Figuration was removed, and in some expressions of Minimalism, the artifacts look as though they were pr...
Consecrations: The Spiritual in Art in the Time of AIDS October 15, 1994 to February 19, 1995 Consecrations is the first group exhibition that seeks to put AIDS within a spiritual framework. The 28 artists in Consecrations represent the religious, ethnic, cultural, sexual and geographical diversity of this country. Several of the artists are expressing first-hand experience ...
Sanctuaries: Recovering the Holy in Contemporary Art, Part One February 14, 1993 to April 11, 1993 MOCRA’s two-part inaugural exhibition features more than 100 works from an wide-ranging roster of artists working in styles ranging from traditional Western figuration to minimalist and geometric abstraction. The artists, generally in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, tend to be disillusioned with the c...
Body and Soul: The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater October 24, 1993 to December 19, 1993 Body and Soul celebrates 35 years of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and its exceptional contributions to contemporary culture. ...
Transformations: Highlights from the MOCRA Collection April 26, 2017 to April 8, 2018 Transformation is an essential element of the creation and experience of art. Artists manipulate materials and perceptions in ways that bring their work, viewers, and themselves to new physical, psychological, and spiritual states of existence. Recognizing and talking about the spiritual and reli...
Georges Rouault: Miserere et Guerre March 8, 2011 to July 31, 2011 Georges Rouault was born in working-class Paris in 1871, and apprenticed as a youth to a stained glass workshop. In late 1890, he enrolled in the École des Beaux-...
Georges Rouault: Miserere et Guerre March 2, 2003 to May 11, 2003 Georges Rouault was born in working-class Paris in 1871, and apprenticed as a youth to a stained glass workshop. In late 1890, he enrolled in the École des Beaux-...
Georges Rouault: Miserere et Guerre January 18, 2000 to April 2, 2000 Georges Rouault was born in working-class Paris in 1871, and apprenticed as a youth to a stained glass workshop. In late 1890, he enrolled in the École des Beaux-...
Georges Rouault: Miserere et Guerre March 21, 1994 to April 26, 1994 Georges Rouault was born in working-class Paris in 1871, and apprenticed as a youth to a stained glass workshop. In late 1890, he enrolled in the École des Beaux-...
Visible Conservation September 22, 2017 to April 8, 2018 In 2016 MOCRA acquired Michael Tracy's powerful 1981 work Cruz to Bishop Oscar Romero, Martyr of El Salvador. With Visible Conservation, we gave visitors a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of the process of documenting and cleaning the work prior to its reassembly and first presentation at MOCRA. ...
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection July 25, 2016 to September 3, 2016 Enjoy a look at some of the most popular works in the MOCRA collection, along with lesser known gems. Featuring works by Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Doug DePice, Robert Farber, Luis González Palma, DoDo Jin Ming, Dean Kessman, Chris McCaw, Daniel Ramirez, and Susan S...
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection May 30, 2015 to August 2, 2015 Enjoy a look at some of the most popular works in the MOCRA collection, along with lesser known gems. Featuring works by Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Junko Chodos, Doug DePice, Luis González Palma, DoDo Jin Ming, Dean Kessman, Frank LaPena, Daniel Ramirez, and Susan S...
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection: The Romero Cross April 21, 2018 to July 28, 2018 Seven months of conservation work culminate in the first public showing at MOCRA of Cruz to Bishop Oscar Romero, Martyr of El Salvador, a major mixed media sculpture by Michael Tracy (b. 1943), who first achieved international recognition in the 1980s, exhibiting in the 1982 Venice Biennal...
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection March 28, 2006 to July 30, 2006 Enjoy a look at some of the most popular works in the MOCRA collection, along with lesser known gems. Featuring works by Seyed Alavi, Luis González Palma, Steven Heilmer, Anne Minich, Shahzia Sikander, Kazuaki Tanahashi, and other artists. above: Sr. Helen David Brancato, Crucif...
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection June 20, 2004 to August 29, 2004 Enjoy a look at some of the most popular works in the MOCRA collection, along with lesser known gems. Featuring works by Peter Ambrose, Gryphon Blackswan, Daniel Goldstein, Steven Luecking, Gary Passanise, Susan Schwalb, Michael Tracy, and other artists. above: Anne Minich, Annie...
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection November 4, 2003 to March 5, 2004 Enjoy a look at some of the most popular works in the MOCRA collection, along with lesser known gems. Featuring works by Seyed Alavi, Nancy Fried, Donald Grant, Tobi Kahn, Virgil Myers, Shahzia Sikander, and other artists. above: Virgil Myers, Noah's Ark, 1999. Latex on wood ...
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection January 7, 2003 to February 23, 2003 Enjoy a look at some of the most popular works in the MOCRA collection, along with lesser known gems. Featuring works by Craig Antrim, Michael David, Sue Eisler, Adrian Kellard, Dean Kessmann, Anne Minich, Daniel Ramirez, and other artists. above: James Rosen, Sta. Cecilia, 1...
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection May 6, 2001 to November 8, 2001 Enjoy a look at some of the most popular works in the MOCRA collection, along with lesser known gems and some works on loan. Featuring works by Peter Ambrose, Lori Bert, Sr. Helen David Brancato, Daniel Goldstein, Carolyn Jones, Stuart Klipper, Horatio Hung-Yan Law, Thomas Skomski, and other arti...
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection July 29, 1999 to December 22, 1999 Enjoy a look at some of the most popular works in the MOCRA collection, along with lesser known gems. Featuring works by Michael David, Eleanor Dickinson, Steven Heilmer, Charlotte Lichtblau, J. W. Mahoney, Jeffrey Miller, and other artists. above: Michael David, Missing in Actio...
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection January 15, 1998 to February 22, 1998 Enjoy a look at some of the most popular works in the MOCRA collection, along with lesser known gems. Featuring works by Gryphon Blackswan, Heidy Sumei Chuang, Greg Edmondson, Jeffrey Miller, Carl Tandatnick, and other artists. above: Gryphon Blackswan, Chasuble for Mass in the T...
Sanctuaries: Recovering the Holy in Contemporary Art, Part Two – Three Major Installations April 18, 1993 to August 29, 1993 MOCRA's two-part inaugural exhibition features more than 100 works from an wide-ranging roster of artists working in styles ranging from traditional Western figuration to minimalist and geometric abstraction. The artists, generally in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, tend to be disillusioned with the cel...
Beyond Words: Three Contemporary Artists and the Manuscript Tradition May 24, 2018 to November 12, 2018 MOCRA, in collaboration with the Special Collections division of the Saint Louis University Libraries, presents an exhibition in the Lambert Gallery at St. Louis Lambert International Airport as part of the ...
MOCRA: 25 September 16, 2018 to March 3, 2019 The Museum of Contemporary Religious Art began with an audacious assertion: many of today’s visual artists engage with the religious and spiritual dimensions in their work—even if they sometimes go about it in ways quite different from prior generations. Despite skepticism from mem...
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Surface to Source February 05, 2020 to November 22, 2020 For his first show curated as Director of MOCRA, David Brinker delves into the MOCRA collection, bringing out works that haven’t been shown in a number of years and juxtaposing them with perennial favorites. The works from the collection are joined by several works on loan. Meanwhile, the remov...
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Lesley Dill: Dream World of the Forest August 24, 2022 to October 16, 2022 MOCRA is pleased to present three new collage-paintings by Lesley Dill, an American artist who works at the intersection of language and fine art in sculpture, printmaking, installation and performance, exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche. Dill transforms the emotions of t...
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Vicente Telles and Brandon Maldonado: Cuentos Nuevomexicanos March 19, 2023 to June 25, 2023 Engaging a Living Tradition Artists Vicente Telles and Brandon Maldonado are forging new links in the chain of the continuing story of the people of New Mexico. Telles is firmly rooted in the Santero tradition (the making of santos, or images of saints), w...
Open Hands: Crafting the Spiritual January 28, 2024 to May 19, 2024 Open Hands: Crafting the Spiritual assembles the work of six intergenerational artists from across the country who use everyday materials, found objects, and elements of craft production to explore issues related to faith and spirituality, personal and cultural identity, and tradition and ...
Selections from the MOCRA Collection September 06, 2023 to December 17, 2023 Enjoy a look at some of the most popular works in the MOCRA collection, along with recent acquisitions and lesser known gems. In particular, we pay tribute to the late James Rosen (1933–2023). In a career spanning more than six decades, Rosen demonstrated a keen under...

Past Exhibitions

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