“I was looking at the people that I was around, that were walking up and down the street and were germane to that neighborhood,” said Anderson.
These people were the unwitting models for his bas-relief sculpture of a Black Jesus breaking bread with 12 Black apostles.
The neighborhood has changed since 1982. So has the building. When New Hope’s congregation left in 1997 for a larger space in Maryland, the frieze stayed behind. The 20-foot wide sculpture was too heavy to move.
Sealed behind drywall and hidden from future tenants, the Last Supper wasn’t unearthed until 2019 when the Studio Acting Conservatory (SAC) bought the building as a place to train actors.
“You really have to see it to believe it,” Emily Morrison, SAC’s executive director, told me the other day as she pulled open a gray curtain to reveal Anderson’s Last Supper.
And now you can see it. The Studio Acting Conservatory is inviting people to see the work from 1 to 4 p.m. this Monday through Saturday.
Anderson grew up on Meridian Place NW, in a house just around the corner from where he would later make the sculpture. He was always artistic. In a way, his first commission was at Raymond Elementary School, when a teacher asked him to paint the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria on brown paper she’d stretched across a classroom wall.
His parents encouraged his creative impulses, buying him paint-by-number sets.
Said Anderson: “I discovered I was an artist when I got tired of matching up the paint with the numbers and started painting the way I wanted to paint the canvas.”
His education continued at Banneker Junior High and Cardozo High. So did his artistic development. Anderson’s family didn’t visit the National Gallery of Art. He remembers his father saying that downtown wasn’t for Black people. Anderson wasn’t sure art was, either. He seldom saw faces like his in the popular media.
“Back in that day, we’d all run to the television set when a Black person was on TV,” said Anderson, 77. “Everything stopped. ‘Nat King Cole is on TV!’ We all ran together and looked together as a family. It was so exciting.”
Anderson was among the first African American students to go to the Corcoran School of Art and Design. He later transferred to Howard University to finish his studies.
“With such rich African American culture being studied and supported and encouraged, I finally felt at home with myself,” he said.
Anderson was a founding member of the faculty at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. A custodian at Ellington recommended him for the New Hope Baptist Church commission. They wanted a mural. Anderson had other ideas. He wanted to include a sculpture in his portfolio.
“They didn’t have the budget for it,” he said. “I said, ‘I want to do this and I’ll do it for the same budget.’”
Anderson built the figures using wire mesh, concrete and a plaster-like material called Structo-Lite. He worked mostly alone when the church was empty.
“That brought about a certain spiritual reckoning, with being in a church by yourself late at night and so forth,” he said. “Sometimes I had to just sit in the pew by myself and reflect on my spirituality.”
Anderson had already reflected on something else: He didn’t think he was setting out to depict a Black Jesus. He wanted to depict Jesus. The historical Jesus wasn’t the blond-haired, blue-eyed figure depicted in many works of art. He would have been darker, Middle Eastern. Jesus and the apostles could look like the Black Washingtonians Anderson grew up with.
Said Anderson: “I think it’s legitimate for people who want to see themselves in a divine personality to say, ‘Okay I want them to look like me.’ I can understand that.”
Anderson is a professor of art at Howard University. His stained glass windows adorn other churches in Washington as well as the Columbia Heights Metro station. When it was clear the Last Supper couldn’t be moved, the National Museum of African American History and Culture stepped in to restore it and create a 3D rendering.
Morrison said after this week, she’s hoping the acting school can reveal the sculpture on a regular basis.
“I do genuinely appreciate the interest in seeing the piece,” Anderson said. “Because I am a believer, I want it to be used as a source of inspiration.”
