How Young Artists Take Inspiration From Religion in Uncertain Times

In February 2022, new to New York and seeking bleeding-edge culture, I found myself at a poetry reading at KGB, an Eastern Bloc-themed bar in the East Village. The night’s second reader took the stage, a solid black crucifix tattooed on her sternum, and read the King James Version of Lamentations, flawlessly and intensely, from start to finish. “And thou hast removed my soul far off from peace,” she intoned. “I forgat prosperity.”

I had spent my adult life distancing myself from a Protestant upbringing. The last avant-garde idea I expected to find in New York City was Christianity. Yet Christian symbolism was everywhere, in good faith and bad. So-called Trad-Cath influencers swooned for Jesus on social media, a trend that may have peaked in August 2022 when an essay published in the opinion section of The New York Times wondered if Catholicism’s coolness could revitalize the church.

In the art galleries, the crucifixes and reliquaries, the angels and demons, felt less like fast fashion. Young artists like Chris Lloyd, Brian Oakes, Rachel Rossin and Harris Rosenblum are among those taking spiritual matters seriously. They mingle not at church but at downtown New York galleries and project spaces, especially Blade Study, Sara’s and Dunkunsthalle. And they’re tech savvy, freely mixing 3-D printing, electronics, digital animation and A.I.

But what unites them more than any particular medium is a return to big questions: Why are we here? Who should we serve? In response, they’re building iconography from pieces of other belief systems: some role-playing games and anime, some major religions.

These artists grew up in an alienating time. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the 2008 financial crash, tumultuous Trumpian politics and waves of protests all helped dislodge the guiding social narratives of previous generations. Covid confronted even 20-somethings with mortality and shook the old order.

And the opaqueness of the technology we have come to depend on for everything stirs age-old superstitions. Kate Crawford, a professor at the U.S.C. Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism who researches A.I., compares some developers of artificial intelligence to a “technical priest class.” Certain leaders in the industry, she said, “genuinely believe that they’re creating an artificial sentience that will be godlike.” But “are they building a vengeful god or a beneficent god.”