In Patron Saints of a Black Boy, Detroit-based artist Rashaun Rucker connects Christian iconography, Black spirituality, and notions of ancestry. The works in the exhibition testify to the legacy of Black people within the Christian tradition, highlighting personal histories while exploring the complexities of representation in religious imagery. Rucker’s sculpture, mixed media works, and photographs exemplify what he calls being “covered in Black”—being protected by “the prayers, pleadings, and rituals practiced in the Black community, including calling on the ancestors, the laying on of hands, altar calls, morning prayers, and a never-ending river of advice.”

Rucker’s heavily ornamented artworks mix symbols from medieval European Christianity and 19th-century Black American churches and spirituality. In You Don’t Have to Go to Church to Get Your God (2024), he appropriates a font —a vessel containing Holy Water typically positioned near the entrance of a Catholic church to remind worshipers of their baptisms. Fonts are typically crowned by a crucifix, angel, or symbolically significant animal; Rucker’s features a cross covered in crystals and rhinestones and displays, at its center, a lenticular black-and-white photographic print that shows an image of Black Christ or an image of his maternal grandfather, James Mansel, depending on the angle at which you view it. This oscillation challenges the distinction between the veneration of the two figures. Both images are vignetted into ellipses and blurred at the edges in a manner suggestive of a halo.

Central to Rucker’s inquiry is the idea of family as a source of spiritual guidance and inspiration. He invites viewers to reflect on the profound influence of family ties and ancestral legacies on individual identities and belief systems, even as he challenges traditional representations of religious concepts and figures. For example, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions (2023) references medieval Christian reliquaries: exquisitely crafted and sumptuous containers for saints’ remains that served as focal points for veneration and pilgrimage. Replacing their typical depictions of saints’ lives with images of his own family members (whom he calls his “personal saints”), Rucker reenvisions these objects as embodiments of resilience, strength, and grace. Representing his family members also addresses the absence of Black figures in historic Christian iconography, offering reinterpretations that celebrate Blackness and—as Rucker puts it— “find God in people.” In Patron Saints of a Black Boy, the divine and the familial converge, offering a poignant reflection on the complexities of faith, heritage, identity, and belonging in the Black experience.

-Phillip A. Townsend, PhD, Curator of Art
Art Galleries at Black Studies | UT Austin