Garden Nativity, 2025

I’m a visual artist and painter. And in every respect, though it’s a three-dimensional construction, this crèche is no different than making a painting. Historically, since I was a child, I’ve been engaged over the holidays with train sets and creating festive environments. I’ve made multiple Thanksgiving and Christmas gardens, with construction and with found objects. This crèche has little architectural elements and old pieces of wood, too. I like to juxtapose unlike elements, just like I juxtapose strokes of paint.

I made an Advent Garden elsewhere last year, and wanted to create another work for Christmas. Frequently, I go to France and Spain, and I love the aspects of music and art in the sanctuaries in the great churches in Europe. Music and art play a critical educational role in raising our consciousness and deepening our faith and love. I spent Christmas in Naples one year, and the Neapolitans and all the little villages compete (in a healthy way!) with their crèches. Each crèche offers an amazingly detailed portrait of that town’s townsfolk, the merchants and farmers, and they are outrageous. Between that, and my own artistic impulse, I had something. And then, when the bishop came to St. John’s before his retirement, he said something that really excited me. He said we should over-create. I thought that is exactly right; that’s how I want to serve St. John’s. I want to over-create.

So I brought together my inner necessity to share, and my astonishment about the beauties, and even the horrors of the world. That’s what art does—it teaches people the capacity to live and love. I owe the authorship to Rev. Anna and the growing adoration of a higher power and Christ in St. John’s in all its diversity. I want to create a crèche to embody a universe. All that come to St. John’s to celebrate the birth of Christ could identify with one creature in that set-up. I tried to include as many ethnicities and human possibilities that I could convey. And I also wanted to signal the outside world. I thought of the Gaza of our time. But I also thought of other “Gazas” in Northampton, Springfield, Holyoke, where people are suffering and hungry. The universal Gaza.

Near my studio, there’s a garden. I gathered up all these wonderful fall seedpods and flower heads and included that as well. One of the things I love most in the work is the sense of a solar system. If you look at it enough, you’ll see there’s a lot of depth behind the crèche, under the star. Then, similarly, there are moons, little glimmering stars and of course the sunflowers. In French, the word for “sunflower” is tournesol, meaning “turn to the sun.” The red heart, at the center, is a big piece too. That is there to provoke children’s and adult’s imagination to enhance and expand our hearts.

The Christmas Garden Crèche is like a painting, in that it really requires reflective practice. You need to take time with it. At first, people are like “Wow, that’s so much!” The more you sit with it, you see it has a vast deep perspective, the foreground and colonnaded forms, the crèche, the arch on top, all flanked by the big dark mass of balsam firs. There is symmetry. It’s not random. It’s encrusted with a lot of layers. Hopefully, all the individual parts work together to create a unified whole.

I posted about the crèche on my social media. One friend called it “a garden nativity.” Another said it was “Jesus in the ruins of Rome.” As an artist I have been committed to beauty. Like all the artist giants whose shoulders I sit on, my task is to create order out of chaos. Here, the columns simulate the Roman forum. It’s a sort of portrait of our wrecked world. No matter how exceptional and clever humans are, capable of creating buildings and cathedrals, those structures degrade. That’s a huge underlying element in the narrative. In the midst of this wreckage, and the ultimate inferiority of human cleverness, is this hope and shining light— reflected by the birth of Christ.