Lo and behold the miracle: votive painting in the public sphere

Abstract

This visual essay takes as its point of departure the Mexican tradition of ex-voto, the votive paintings that are offered to the saints to fulfil a vow. In particular, it explores contemporary forms of votive paintings to elucidate what becomes of miracles when they are transposed to the public art sphere. My case study focuses on the work of a Mexican art collective whose members are devoted to Santa Muerte (Saint Death) and reveals that art can act as literal embodiments of a thaumaturgy – the supernatural work of the saint – and as expressions of the rippling effects of a miracle. This paper proposes, that the manifold scales and expressions of a miracle, observed through their paintings, become visible in the public sphere. Ultimately, it contends that by increasing the visibility of thaumaturgy, artwork made in thanks to a saint comes to contain the manifold temporal consequences of a single miraculous event.

Keywords:

• miracle
• thaumaturgy
• scales
• Santa Muerte
• devotion
• votive paintings
• public art
• Tlacolulokos
• Oaxaca

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to the members of the art collective Los Tlacolulokos, Dario Canul and Cosijoesa Cernas, for their trust, for sharing their art practice and stories with me, and for being always available to answer my ceaseless questions. I owe special thanks to Frida Canul for taking pictures in the Capilla del Señor de Tlacolula on very short notice. I want to thank World Art and two anonymous reviewers for their engagement with my work. Special thanks also go to George Lau for his fantastic editorial support. I am also very grateful to Raja Chinnadurai and Sarah Rogers for carefully reviewing various versions of this essay. My thanks also go to the Princeton University Art Museum and the Dallas Museum for graciously giving permission for picture reproduction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Myriam Lamrani is an anthropologist whose work focuses on Christianity, intimacy, statecraft, and images. She graduated in Art History and Pre-Columbian Archaeology (ULB, Brussels – UNAM, Madrid). She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL, London. Her doctoral research on devotional images, dreams, and art in Oaxaca, Mexico proposes ‘intimacy’, as an anthropological currency and as a lens through which to look at the inclusion of politics into the religious. She has published in Urbanities, LSE Latin America and Caribbean Blog, and The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Notes

1 Space constraints do not allow for a full description of this mural, but the painting refers to an event that shocked Mexican society: the mass kidnapping and disappearance of 43 students from the Normal Rural School Isidro Burgos of Ayotzinapa on 26 December 2014. They went missing while on their way to Mexico City to commemorate the Tlatelolco Massacre. To this day the 43 are still missing. The disappearance of the young men has become emblematic of the recent rise of violence in Mexico (see Zagato 2018).

2 The art collective was invited to paint a series of murals within the cultural event Lille 3000 – El Dorado (April 27, 2019 – December 1, 2019) where Mexican artists were honoured https://www.eldorado-lille3000.com/en/eldorado-2/ [Accessed November 7, 2019].

3 ‘Chicano’ refers to people of Mexican ancestry living in the United States.

4 The Tlacolulokos painted a mural for Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in L.A. — Oaxaca in L.A. as part of the Getty Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative http://oaxaca.lfla.org/ [Accessed January 13, 2020].

Additional information

Funding

Part of the research on which this paper draws was funded by the European Research Council (grant number ERC-2013-CoG, 617970, CARP).