Mark Doox’s ‘Love Has Never Been a Popular Movement’ is a Reverential Reckoning

Mark Doox’s fourth solo exhibition with Jonathan LeVine Projects, Love Has Never Been a Popular Movement, is a moment of truth, a reckoning with the words we say and the nefarious ways of being racialized, Christian, and American.

Love is the way and yet, so few people take it, instead taking the power of white-body supremacy while faking solidarity as fellow American citizens and Christians. It’s a sleight of hand.

“Love has never been a popular movement. And no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free,” James Baldwin said. 

The first image is of the patron saint of truth-telling, holding a book turned to a page that frames these words in one hand and, in his other hand, gives the seer his blessing and a cursed cross lined with drops of blood.

Doox rattles the chains within each frame. Each image is more than striking. It is confrontative, challenging our images and representatives of love, truth, and freedom.

See what you say. See what your words look like in Doox’s mixed-media acrylic collage paintings. 

They are testy when placed alongside the words of Jesus and James Baldwin, a dynamic duo. You will also be tested, as this exhibition includes a quiz that I hope you consider easy. It’s an open exhibition test.

See love spelled out and framed. See how the image of love in Christ was framed, nailed and is now pinned up as a poster child of white Christian nationalism.

How did we get here? You will have to follow each frame. There are messages woven within and throughout: blackface and white mouth, chapter and versed, scrolled out.

Doox’s work is a love offering handed to us in the name of love. If you believe in it, then take it and work out your salvation from this country’s hatreds in the name of love—of money, of power, of self.

See it as a reflection. It’s in our eyes. 

Doox’s Love Has Never Been a Popular Movement is a steady mirror for those who want to put on the brave face of love that is rare and difficult. His work and ours are countercultural, removing the mask and choosing vulnerability, responsibility, and the true freedom that love demands over the status quo masks of conformity.

Doox’s artistry includes word work that does a number of things: inviting us to look deeply into ourselves while facing how our words have worked in America’s founding myth of exceptionalism, which even claims Jesus is made in the image of whiteness. “JES U.S. CHRIST.” Even the divine wants to be white and shirks the responsibilities of heaven and earth to live in this “Promised Land,” to be mass-produced and hung again in sanctuaries and homes. 

Likewise, African Americans are hung again in “After Church,” crucified afresh as lynching makes the rounds again. For love of this country and for the onlooker’s entertainment, their bodies are strung up, sacrificed for God’s blessing of this country. 

Because love has never been popular but hate always is and the love-hate relationship of Christianity depends on the Jesus you’re following: “The Abundant Christ,” “Maga Christ,” “Baldwin Christ,” “Jes’ Us Christ,” “Frederick Douglass Christ: Post Truth,” “Bible Quiz Christ,” “The Nationalized Christ,” “Charlie Kirk’s Christ,” or “Anti- Christ.”

Love Has Never Been a Popular Movement asks whether love, in its most demanding and disruptive sense, can survive once religion becomes popular, institutionalized, and aligned with state power,” the Jonathan LeVine Projects said in a press release. “Working within a deliberately constructed iconographic system, Doox examines the theological, political, and cultural forces shaping contemporary Christian nationalism through use of recurring figures such as Typical White Christ, Jesus Impossible: The Black Messiah, and Baphomet Saint Sambo (among others). Each icon contributes to the larger visual argument about power, belief, and devotion, demonstrating how sacred imagery can be challenged without losing its authority.”

Watch the hands throughout this exhibit. A show of hands or a hands-off approach because it’s really “JES’ US.” Receive the blessing of this sight and Doox, our visionary.

The online exhibition can be visited here.