Carrot Pietà

A gender-fluid visual artist and drag performer, Jerome Caja was raised in Cleveland in an observant Catholic family. In 1985 they moved to San Francisco where their career flourished, until they died of AIDS-related illness in 1995 at age 37. Working with implements that one might find in a drag queen’s purse, from nail polish to mascara and lipstick, their work is distinguished by painstaking detail, a dark sense of humor and irony, and a sincere faith in the promise of salvation and redemption.

Well versed in art history, Caja often translated biblical scenes into ones addressing their experience as a queer, gender-fluid Catholic. Carrot Pietà comes from a series that Caja made with the ashes of their friend, the artist Charles Sexton, giving the painting its textured surface. Caja and Sexton made a bet: whoever died of AIDS first would be the winner and the loser would have to make art out of their ashes. Here, a carrot stands in for Christ, cradled by a Virgin bunny, while a cock looks on (Caja, a deft punster, insisted that they only painted cocks, never roosters).