The women quickly adopted the altarpiece idea, and chose to duplicate the exact dimensions of the original in Colmar. But instead of Christ and the saints in Grunewald's masterpiece, they depicted the residents of their own village — an AIDS widow, an eccentric “prophet” who dances on the sand dunes, and several of Hamburg's most respected older women.
“It's a way of showing people that they're the same as the saints,” Hofmeyr said.
At the bottom of the altarpiece, where Grunewald painted the Entombment of Christ, the women showed the funeral of Dumile Paliso, who died of AIDS at age 35. Paliso's body is covered with festering sores, just like that of Christ in Grunewald's painting.
The innermost layer of Grunewald's altarpiece is hollow to show statues of several saints, but the innermost layer of the modern work consists of photos of Mangwane and two other grandmothers who raise some of Hamburg's many AIDS orphans.
“These are strong, strong, strong women,” Hofmeyr said.
The Keiskamma Altarpiece was shown at St. James Anglican Cathedral in Toronto during a recent international AIDS conference. It will be on display in Chicago until Sept. 20, when it will move on to Los Angeles for several months at UCLA, which partly underwrote the cost of the tour. Later stops may be arranged.
“We want to bring it back to Hamburg, but we have no church there,” said Mangwane. “We Anglicans take turns meeting in one another's homes, and the Methodists and Baptists do the same. We also have no post office, and only one tarred street, but that doesn't bother us, because we also have no cars.”
On the Net:
Keiskamma Trust: www.keiskamma.org
St. James Cathedral: www.saintjamescathedral.org
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