Toledo is latest city to install ‘Homeless Jesus’ sculpture
Timothy Schmalz has lost track of just how many times he’s shipped out a version of what’s perhaps his best-known sculpture: A blanketed figure lying on a bench, his face obscured, so that just the nail wounds in his exposed feet identify him.
“I really have lost count, which is a good thing,” said Toronto-based Schmalz, who recalled that he ini- tially struggled to find just a single taker for his “Home- less Jesus.”
“I know right now one has just been installed in the Metropolitan Cathedral in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and one is being shipped, as we speak, and it is going to be placed outside the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City,” he said, speaking earlier this month. “Both those places are the center of those nations, of those countries, as far as the spiritual center . ... It’s exciting to have this very, very humble representation of Jesus right beside this massive beautiful architecture, and the history of both of those cathedrals.”
Sin c e the sculptor’s “Homeless Jesus” first began attracting the attention of passers-by outside Regis College at the University of Toronto in 2013, it’s been installed in Dublin, Madrid, Moscow, Johannesburg, Singapore, New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C.
It’s at the Vatican and in Capernaum, where the artist points out that Jesus himself once walked.
“Homeless Jesus” has found another location in recent weeks, too: Trinity Episcopal Church in Toledo installed the statue outside its facade in September, presenting it as both a testament to and a reminder of the mission of the church, specifically, and its faith tradition more broadly.
The Rev. Lisa Tucker-Gray said she’s been happy to see passers-by taking notice of it.
“I think the irony is that people who are marginal- ized by their circumstances are ignored and therefore invisible,” she said. “So this statue is a shocking invi- tation to stop and maybe rethink who we actually see and acknowledge. And then ask: What are we going to do about that?”
Schmalz, a prolific sculp- tor who works out of a stu- dio near Ontario, and whose profile was recently ele- vated with a large-scale, migrant-themed installa- tion, Angels Unawares, at the Vatican, described a similar intention for his most widely known work. He was inspired years ago by a blanketed individual he saw in his own city, he said - an experience that left him with “this feeling that I had just seen something very spiritual.” He headed to his studio and started sculpting.
He sees “Homeless Jesus” as a visualization of the Gospel of Matthew.
“If you look at the words in the New Testament, and you would ask Jesus, ‘How would you like to be represented?’ Well he said it in Matthew 25: He basically suggests that he wants to be totally interchangeable with the least in our community,” Schmalz, who is Catholic, said. “His words are fascinating. He doesn’t say it’s a good thing to help the poor. He says, ‘When you help the poor, you are helping me.’ That relationship is a lot stronger than a goodwill gesture.”