Imitatio Mary is a mixed-media collage piece including paint, sketch, synthetic braiding hair, foil, dried natural elements and more. It is centered by a female with cornrows facing backwards. She has a baby on her back, wrapped in a book cover-swaddle, head turned and facing forward with afro plats and a gold tooth in its mouth. The female has her left hand raised, with a jewel on the ring finger - as if pledging to the Truth. The textured background includes pictures of the moon and sun and nature scenes symbolizing interconnectivity with all of life’s creation/tures. This paper gives careful consideration to the feelings and thoughts that arose while researching and creating this art piece.
The first section provides an overview and analysis of the narrative of the birth of Jesus. It considers ancient sources like the Christian Second Testament and The Protoevangelium of James for historical and contextual exploration of Mary and Joseph’s call to parent Jesus. Questions pertaining to divine-human nature, challenges surrounding gender norms, roles, and expectations, and religious and political duties and socio-economic statuses are all addressed within this visual art piece and the aforementioned sources.
The Protoevangelium of James provides an account of Mary’s childhood, where she spent time alone, was then reared in the temple, interacting with angels, and then wandering to and fro because of a predestined sacred duty of bearing and advocating for the Truth that Jesus would bring to their world. This prompted me to consider notions of extreme ascetic and monastic movements that often separate social and personal endeavors. Therefore, the second section of this paper looks at ancient Christian asceticism and readings from the fourth century Bishop of Milan, Ambrose as primary sites for engaging the role Mary played as saint and ascetic model for early followers of the Christian faith. While close attention is given to the virginal status of Mother Mary within this realm of asceticism, I depart by focusing on the ideological principles of asceticism like discipline and contemplation unattached to any particular action to uplift it as a method for approaching contemporary social and environmental concerns.
As a Black American woman from a working class family in north central Texas, born into the African Methodist Episcopal Church, raised in the Black Southern Baptist denomination, and now maturing and constantly evolving within the African Diasporic practice of Southern Hoodoo, I couldn’t help but reimagine Mary from this lens. How would she speak to me and my community? What could and would devotion to the characteristics that she embodied look like? Therefore, the third section of this paper reads Stacie McCormick’s Staging Black Fugitivity alongside the forced migration to Bethlehem and flight to Egypt by Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. The goal is to display how escape, retreat, and/or withdrawal can serve as valuable avenues towards resistance and freedom.
Mary, Mother of Jesus was selected and has since been honored as an exemplar worth imitating for generations to come. Some of the early Christian writers even viewed her as an ascetic role model, one whose commitment and discipline to the call of the angel would go on to justify the establishment of Christian and “pagan” cults, religious denominations and ceremonies to be celebrated throughout the year. These moves toward asceticism were a calling to resist and thus restore the social dynamics of the time. Therefore, this paper analyzes the research that inspired the mixed-media collage visual art piece Imitatio Mary. It uses Black feminist and womanist thought as its primary interpretive lens for contemporary settings to address how the life of Mary, Mother of Jesus, draws attention to class oppression, yet also the resiliency and value of oppressed beings.