People love or hate Gratia Plena.
One blogger wrote—”Where bad morals and ugly art meet”—that Gratia Plena is a symbol of everything wrong with the relatively progressive Jesuit Seattle University. David Stoesz, a columnist writing under the title “The Slutty Eye” in Seattle Weekly, praised its “hulking, magnificently bizarre presence” in 2009.
I first heard of the milk sculpture when I asked queer video/performance artist Wynne Greenwood, winner of the 2008 Stranger Genius Award in art, to recommend her unsung favorite works of art. “The milk sculpture at Seattle U,” she said immediately.
“Women who have studied theology have a difficult time with Mary, because she’s either a suffering mother or a servant or a handmaid of the Lord—she’s associated with all this imagery of women as a second-class citizen,” Venker says. “And here’s a sculpture that leaves it open to another direction. So a lot of feminists and women in our theology department like it.”
For those who don’t, and who needed to worship a Mary they could relate to, the chapel managers independently added another, traditional sculpture of Mary in an alcove off to the right of Gratia Plena. This Mary is small and sits on a tabletop. She is a reproduction of a famous black Madonna figure from Catalonia, sculpted centuries ago.
St. Ignatius Chapel, by architect Steven Holl, is renowned for its unexpected intimacy—how often are you that close to the altar in a Catholic church?—and the way it directs soft, vivid colored shafts of light in every direction throughout its interior. It won the National American Institute of Architects Design Award and Religious Architecture Award, and the Museum of Modern Art owns a model of it. Since its opening in 1997, St. Ignatius has attracted visitors from far and wide, as well as provided repeated sanctuary and solace for local people of all persuasions. The chapel may not do the work of the Vatican, but it does the work of the Lord, if you know what I mean.
St. Ignatius has its detractors, too.
“Some people have massive problems with the chapel being so contemporary, but too bad: We were building for tomorrow, not yesterday,” Venker says.
St. Ignatius does have conventional elements: a traditional cross over the altar, the alcove of the Blessed Sacrament, elegant hard pews. “We wanted one piece of contemporary art to match the contemporary nature of the building,” Venker remembers.
Every Catholic church has a shrine to Mary—here, the Marian shrine would be the contemporary art, the committee decided.
The first call for artists yielded several preliminary proposals, but after extensive review and discussion, the committee found itself no closer to a candidate. Everything they looked at didn’t live up to the architecture.
“Our thing was, ‘How do you do the Virgin Mary without doing a cliché?’” Venker says.
There was talk of scrapping the commission altogether and installing a typical Mary (like the one that was added later).
Venker had one idea. He’d noticed a Virgin Mary sculpture exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in St. Louis in 1997. It was by Steve Heilmer, and titled Nativity Stone: Mother’s Milk. It was a take on Mary. Made of Carrara marble, Michelangelo’s favorite material, the sculpture mixed a centuries-old and popular trompe l’oeil aesthetic with a fresh, nonliteral interpretation of how Mary could be represented.
The committee brought Nativity Stone: Mother’s Milk to the lobby at St. Ignatius to gauge reaction. People responded so well that the committee was persuaded to hire Heilmer, who proposed Gratia Plena. But the saga was not over.
Heilmer ordered his Carrara marble from Italy, drove his truck up to Chicago to pick it up off the ship from Milan, and brought it back to his studio in the corn fields of Illinois. Venker visited and watched as Heilmer finished.
“He got to the end of it, and decided this marble wasn’t really what he wanted,” Venker says. “It was pure but it wasn’t translucent. The light didn’t go through it.”
Heilmer decided he had to start all over again.