Brooklyn Native Captures Calvary in Stations Exhibit

THE WALK TO CALVARY: In the year 2005, Virginia Maksymowicz completed a major commission for St. Thomas the Episcopal Church in Lancaster, Pa., for a set of Stations to be used during Lent. The unexpected invitation gave her the unprecedented opportunity to apply her own contemporary approach to a tradition that can be traced back to the 14th century. She felt it imperative to work with a variety of models, a total of 11, that she brought together from a wide range of ages and ethnicities to

represent Christ’s walk to Calvary.

“A lot of an artist’s life is making ends meet and making your art work,” says Virginia Maksymowicz, a Bay Ridge native whose powerful Stations of the Cross exhibit has touched thousands. The work is currently on view at The Narthex Gallery at St. Peter’s Church, Manhattan.

“I don’t normally do work with religious iconography,” she says of the exhibit. “But the reason I wanted to do it was because I thought it would be interesting to have something really specific and human (depicted in the Stations). I wanted to capture every pore, every bump, every mole, every hair, and make it very real, with something somewhat universal and generalized.”

Maksymowicz

Usually known for her work and presentations that deal with political, social and human rights issues, she added, “People think that religious art always depicts Jesus or a saint. They don’t think of religious work possibly being contained within economic injustice.”

Maksymowicz was born, baptized and married in St. Patrick’s, Bay Ridge, where she grew up on 92nd St. and Ft. Hamilton Pkwy. Her brother is a priest of the diocese, Msgr. John Maksymowicz, currently working in Washington, D.C.

She briefly described her days as a student at St. Patrick’s, Bay Ridge, where she graduated in 1965, and then went on to Bishop Kearney H.S., where “we had the reputation for rolling our skirts up because the nuns would add two inches to it.”

After graduation in 1969, she “went off to Brooklyn College and finished in 1973, studied for a year at the Brooklyn Museum Art School, then went to the University of San Diego, where I got my master’s of Visual Arts.”

She says of the experience, “I suffered culture shock when I got to California. Being a Brooklyn kid and all, I didn’t know how to drive!”

Commission for the Stations

Maksymowicz has been an artist for over three decades. “I don’t know many people in the religious art world,” she said, as she described the differences between secular and religious art.

“There is a split in the art world between the two. But the gallery that I am showing in is of one of the places where the two worlds cross over.”

As an associate professor of sculpture at Franklin and Marshall College, she and her husband, Blaise Tobia, a photographer and professor at Drexel University, make their home in Philadelphia.

When she heard that St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Lancaster, Pa., was asking for artists to present their ideas for a Stations of the Cross to be designed and made for the church, she went before the board.

ADDING THE FINAL TOUCHES: Maksymowicz prepares for the exhibition’s opening night.

“The committee saw my previous work, and they trusted me to do the Stations because they saw the images I achieved through body casting,” she explained.
Maksymowicz used alginate, “the stuff that dentists use to make an impression of your mouth.” She slathered it over her models, made a mold, and then poured in plaster.

“There is a certain reality that you can’t get from sculpting. With alginate, you see every pore, every cuticle, every mole of the model. Generally, from body casting, you get the realism,” she said.

It was not a traditional Stations of the Cross.

Members of the commission gave her two restrictions. Each station must be within a 24-inch square format and light enough to put up and take down every Lenten season.

“If you can imagine being at the original walk to Calvary, and having a frame and carrying it with you and going up to the different scenes and just holding this frame and finding whatever you can within 24 inches of space… Each station just frames one section of a body,” she described.

The stations in her exhibition show, for example, Jesus’ hands tied together with rope when he is condemned to death. In another station, “When Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the cross, you see one hand reaching out to another to carry the cross... Simon’s hand could have been your hand,” she said.

“There aren’t a lot of identifiable characters, which allowed me to use a variety of different models,” she explained. “I tried to get a real range of ethnicities: African-American, Chinese, Argentinian, German, Irish and even Jewish, to mold different parts of the stations out of these models.”

She credits her Catholic upbringing and faith to influencing many of her works. She says, “I am still a practicing Catholic, but I am also a practicing artist.”
She was commissioned in December 2000, and finished the exhibit in May 2005. Because she is a full-time professor, most of the work took place during the summer months when classes were not in regular session. She says, “Luckily, the community at St. Thomas was not in a rush!”

Her exhibition, The Stations of the Cross, can be seen until April 11, daily from 9 a.m. - 7 p.m. at The Narthex Gallery at St. Peter’s Church, 619 Lexington Ave. at 54th St. For more information, call 212-935-2200.

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