Apparently, Houston Texas has a Satan problem.

Pakistani-American sculptor Shahzia Sikander has created an interesting sculpture that is to be displayed on the University of Houston’s campus.  It is called “Now” and depicts a golden, powerful feminine figure with thick, circular braids of hair which the artist calls a “crown of female potency.”  

Importantly, the figure wears a lace collar around her neck in the style of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  In some displays of the statue (when it is called “Witness”) the figure wears a skirt that is designed to look like the stained-glass dome of the Manhattan Appellate Courthouse in New York. 

Sikander has also named the figure “Havah” which is the Hebrew of “Eve” from the Genesis creation story whom the artist describes as the first woman to “break the rules.”

It didn’t take long for Texas’ largest anti-choice group, “Texas Right to Life,” to declare the sculpture an act of “disobedience to God.”  In their view, it is clearly a depiction of a feminine Satan, what with the “ram’s horns” on her head (the hair braids).  

“A statue honoring child sacrifice has no place in Texas,” says the group in reference to the Ginsburg homage to the figure.  

Reading the right-to-choose debate into the sculpture isn’t a mistake.  Sikander titled it “Now” because women’s health care is at risk right “now” and she did indeed create the statue to pay homage to Ginsburg because “she is a fierce woman and a form of resistance in a space that has historically been dominated by patriarchal representation… With Ginsburg’s death and the reversal of Roe, there was a setback to women’s constitutional progress.”

I’m amazed that artwork meant to “demonstrate how justice is conceptually and actively vibrant across cultures and genders” is so easily and quickly relegated to the realm of Satanism.  It feels like another example of how artistic expression today does not cause a sharing of views and interpretations, but rather hatred and judgmentalism that leaves no space for dialog.

At the same time, it is heartening to know that the University of Houston is unmoved by the demands (now coming on a national level) to abandon the plan to display the sculpture.  As long as there are such artists and such institutions, there is great cause for hope and confidence in our shared future.

See you in church,

–Rev. Dominic