Global Christian Worship

Stephen Towns (American, 1980–), The Shepherd of Sandtown, 2014. Acrylic and metal leaf on panel, 30 × 24 in. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.

The Shepherd of Sandtown by Stephen Towns
https://www.goucher.edu/rosenberg-gallery/exhibits/a-migration

This is a very potent image; read commentary about it by Victoria Emily Jones in her insightful blog post at
https://artandtheology.org/2017/09/17/stephen-towns-a-migration-exhibit/

Excerpts:

Sandtown is a historically black neighborhood in West Baltimore. It too has been depressed for decades. Now, more than a third of its houses are abandoned, more than a fifth of working-age residents are unemployed, and nearly a third of its families live below the poverty line. Sandtown is where Freddie Gray grew up, whose death while in police custody, ruled a homicide by the medical examiner, sparked the 2015 riots in Baltimore.

The Shepherd of Sandtown (painted a year before Gray’s death) employs imagery of the Good Shepherd, an allegorical representation of Christ first used by early Christians in the catacombs.

But in this painting, which figure is Christ: the shepherd, or the sheep? …

Towns deliberately conflates the two, I think, in this image. I love how he subverts the much more common image of a white man carrying a white sheep, giving us instead a black man carrying a black sheep. Not only that, this shepherd is walking through a modern-day urban environment in a T-shirt, not kicking through the Galilean dust in a first-century robe. This recoloring and transplantation of the Good Shepherd and his sheep helps revivify the biblical allegory, giving African Americans especially new eyes to see that Christ is relevant to their context: he carries them (or they are called to carry him, if you’d rather) right through the thick of daily life.

See Victoria’s blog post for more about this artist and this painting as part of a triptych.
https://artandtheology.org/2017/09/17/stephen-towns-a-migration-exhibit/

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Thanks to Tamara Hill Murphy for reminding me of  the painting in her blog post at
https://www.tamarahillmurphy.com/blogthissacramentallife/fourth-sunday-of-eastertide/2019/5/8