Women Crucified for the Sins of the Fathers: Censorship and the Crucifixion Motif in the Art of Rachael Romero

A just/discriminating censorship is impossible.

—Susan Sontag¹

I confront stigma and injustice as a multidisciplinary artist, exemplifying and encouraging healing, transformation and empowerment through creative expression.

—Rachael Romero²

As the conveyor of Rachael Romero’s personal history, I experienced injustice when I arrived in Rome to present my paper “‘Art Has Always Saved Me’: The Crucifixion Motif in the Work of Rachael Romero” at the Religion, Nature, and Art Conference at the Missionary Ethnological Museum of the Vatican Museums in October 2011. I had traveled from Canberra, in my role as curator of the exhibition Inside: Life in Children’s Homes and Institutions at the National Museum of Australia.³ Inside included the personal narrative of Rachael Romero, who was confined as a teenager during the late 1960s in the Convent of the Good Shepherd, known as The Pines, in South Australia. The series of Romero’s drawings, entitled Magdalene Diaries, includes the crucifixion motif to depict the violation of basic rights of teenage girls at the hands of those in power at The Pines.

Romero’s Magdalene Diaries exemplifies her sociopolitical commentary, also demonstrated by her former work as cofounder and principal artist of the San Francisco Poster Brigade (1975–83).⁴ Romero, now living in New York, is an interdisciplinary artist, evident in her photography and digital media as well as her earlier mass installations, billboards, and street posters. Her film In the Shadow of Eden premiered at the Yale Center for British Art in September 2003.⁵ Concurrent with the creation of her artworks, Romero has led art workshops for neurodiverse adults who have been homeless and inner-city children in the New York Housing Authority. She has also taught at Pratt Institute, New York; the Bosphorus University, in Istanbul; and the Advanced Learning Lab at New York University. In 2013 Romero’s work was shown in an exhibition entitled I Want the Wide American Earth: An Asian Pacific American Story at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The drawings that comprise Magdalene Diaries are part of the preparation for her pending film Magdalene Inferno.

Twenty-four hours before I was scheduled to present my paper, I was met by two flustered conference organizers who were fearful about the content of my presentation. This was despite the fact that my following abstract had been accepted months previously:

“Art Has Always Saved Me”: The Crucifixion Motif in the Work of Rachael Romero

Rachael Romero is a multidisciplinary artist living in New York, USA, and one of 500,000 Forgotten Australians, who, as children, experienced institutional “care.” Romero’s art features crucifixion motifs to convey her experiences of incarceration and slave labor in the Good Shepherd Sisters’ laundry in Adelaide, South Australia. In this paper, through Romero’s art, I will discuss conflicting notions of the nature of adolescent women: the state’s need to curb a perceived threat of female juvenile delinquency versus Romero’s needs at the time for nurturing and self-expression.⁶

Obviously, there had not been adequate consultation between conference organizers before my paper was accepted, and further discussion about my presentation during the week of the conference had prompted some alarm. I was told that my presentation could not include any criticism of the Pope or the Vatican. I knew that my paper did not include such criticism, and, to reassure them, I confidently handed over a complete copy of my paper and the accompanying PowerPoint images. As the priest flicked through the hard copy of my presentation, he raised other concerns. Further discussion revealed that mention of the Pope or the Vatican was not his only worry. The conference, coincidentally, coincided with the Ad Limina visit of the Australian Catholic bishops. The Ad Limina Apostolorum (meaning “to the threshold of the apostles”) refers to the quinquennial pilgrimage to Rome that bishops are expected to fulfill in order to visit the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul and to report to the Pope on the state of their dioceses. Given the...