Renée Cox:
I made this work in 1996: a five-panel restaging of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, with eleven Black men and a white Judas at the table, and myself standing nude at the center in the position of Christ, arms outstretched.

In 2001, the piece was shown at the Brooklyn Museum as part of Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers, an exhibition of ninety-four Black photographers. Mayor Rudy Giuliani called it “disgusting,” “outrageous,” and “anti-Catholic,” and announced he would convene a “decency panel” to set standards for art shown in any museum receiving city funding. It was his second run at the Brooklyn Museum — two years earlier he'd tried to pull the museum's funding and lease entirely over the Sensation exhibition, and a federal court stopped him. This time, the ACLU came out publicly against the proposed panel, calling it unconstitutional and pointing out that the First Amendment draws a hard line between the Mayor's private religious objections and public policy. The panel Giuliani assembled never produced the standards he'd promised.

My answer to all of it was simple: I have a right to reinterpret the Last Supper the same way Leonardo da Vinci did — with people who look like him. The uproar was never really about the composition. It was about a Black woman with nothing to hide and dared to position herself at the center of that table, as I was educated to believe that we are all created in the likeness of God.

The work has since traveled to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Oratorio di San Ludovico, a seventeenth-century church in Venice, during the 1999 Biennale; each show unfolding the piece into a longer conversation about how the Last Supper has been depicted across cultures. In 2012, critic Camille Paglia said, “This, I think, is a serious statement, this work. It might be shocking to have a nude black woman in the position of Christ, but I think, as a whole, the work had some dignity, it had gravitas."