# @drawingcenter on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/BXvUX1ShVj-
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/16046598-drawingcenter-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/fe34c69eda.jpg
- **Posted:** 2017-08-13T15:40:38.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** The Drawing Center (@drawingcenter) — https://gondola.cc/drawingcenter

## Caption

On view: "Where Do We Stand? Two Years of Drawing with Open Sessions" is the second whole-group exhibition of the Open Sessions program. Wed-Sun 12-6pm | Thurs 12-8pm. 〰〰
In the second or third century CE, a crude drawing was scratched into the plaster wall of an imperial page school in Rome, depicting a person interacting with a crucified figure with the head of an ass; the accompanying inscription  can be translated as “Alexamenos worships his god.” Scholars interpret this graffito as part of a wave of anti-Christian sentiment during this period, including the charge that Christians worshipped an ass-headed god, a libel that had been formerly deployed against Jews. In his “Apologeticus”(197 C.E.), the Christian scholar Tertullian offers this response to charges of onolatry: “If the image we cherish is a freak, it doesn't really matter what kind of freak.” Rafael Kelman’s reimagining of the Alexamenos Graffito might serve as a stumbling block for those complicit in the persecution of religious minorities within today’s Christian majority societies, as well as a paradoxical monument to the embrace of the freakish, the syncretic, and the vulnerable..
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Pictured: Rafael Kelman, “The calumny of onolatry, or ass-worship”, 2017, Concrete, Steel rebar, 14 x 40 x 68 inches
#opensessions #rafaelkelman

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opensessions, rafaelkelman

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