The cathedral unveiled the new stained-glass windows Saturday, seven years after it started reconsidering its Confederate imagery.
Kerry James Marshall, whose works have adorned the walls of national galleries and celebrities’ mansions, couldn’t imagine charging Washington National Cathedral his usual fee to replace its Confederate-themed windows. Instead, he requested a commission symbolizing 1865, the year the nation’s last enslaved African Americans“It’s a full payment that I can accept as a completely free individual, able to make decisions about myself and the things I do and who I do it for,” Marshall said.
Prominent African Americans, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, gave readings as part of the service. Jackson read an excerpt from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” “You have to strive for justice. It’s not something that is just there,” he said. “It just seemed to me that if I was going to have the windows really embody the concept, they had to really address the activity.”
Cathedral leaders were thrilled when Marshall agreed to the project and submitted a sketch of his vision, Hollerith said. They didn’t ask him to make a single change, in contrast to someInside a cramped garage near Richmond in June, Marshall used a roller to spread black paint on a piece of yellow foam. He pressed a printing block into the dye — composed of ground glass and a binder — and carefully matched it to the spot on the glass where a character’s face should be.
“The windows have to speak for themselves in some way,” Marshall said. “They have to not require a curatorial explanation in order for people to understand what they seem to be wanting to do.”Although the windows will adorn a church, Marshall views the image as purely secular. The characters in the painting appear anonymous — with many of their faces covered — and none are portrayed as more important, like a deity would be, Marshall said.
“The poem is not illustrative of the windows, and the windows are not illustrative of the poem,” she said. “But they, I think, really, really harmonize.”
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