Yo Mama's Last Supper

File:Yo Mama's Last Supper.jpg

Yo Mama's Last Supper, 1996

Yo Mama's Last Supper is a work of art created by Jamaican-American artist Renée Cox in 1996. It is a large photographic montage of five panels, each 31 inches square, depicting photographs of 11 black men, a white Judas and a naked black woman (the artist's self-portrait)<ref>Template:Cite webTemplate:Dead link</ref> posed in imitation of Leonardo da Vinci's 1490s painting The Last Supper. Cox is pictured naked and standing, with her arms reaching upwards, as Jesus.<ref name="Danto">Arthur Coleman Danto, "Renee Cox: Yo Mama's Last Supper", in Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life (Columbia University Press, 2003), Template:ISBN, pp. 101-108. Excerpts available at Google Books.</ref>

In 2001, the piece was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art as part of an exhibition called Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers. New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was offended by the work and called for the creation of a panel to create decency standards for all art shown at publicly funded museums in the city.<ref name="Bumiller">Elizabeth Bumiller, "Affronted by Nude 'Last Supper,' Giuliani Calls for Decency Panel", The New York Times, February 16, 2001.</ref><ref>Monte Williams, "'Yo Mama' Artist Takes On Catholic Critic", The New York Times, February 21, 2001.</ref> Art scholar Camille Paglia, however, said in 2012 that "Renée Cox is an important black photographer and a performance artist, who uses herself... 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."<ref>Camille Paglia, "Taking Offense: When Art and the Sacred Collide," (lecture), Fordham University, April 25, 2012.</ref>

The work has also been included in other exhibitions about artistic depictions of The Last Supper, in locations such as the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut; Oratorio di San Ludovico, a 17th-century Catholic church in Venice, Italy;<ref name="Bumiller"/> and a gallery in Jakarta, Indonesia.<ref>Carla Bianpoen, "Revisiting 'The Last Supper'", The Jakarta Post, April 11, 2009.</ref>

Bibliography

• S. Brent Plate, Blasphemy: Art that Offends, Black Dog Publishing, London, 2006. Template:ISBN
• Francesca Bonazzoli, Michele Robecchi, Mona Lisa to Marge: How the World's Greatest Artworks Entered Popular Culture, Prestel, New York, 2014. Template:ISBN