Washington National Cathedral announced Thursday that it had selected the painter Kerry James Marshall to design racial justice-themed replacements for stained-glass depictions of Confederate generals, reports NBC BLK.
“The Cathedral’s commission represents Marshall’s first time working with stained-glass as a medium, and the windows are expected to be his first permanent public exhibition anywhere in the country,” the cathedral saud un a news release.
Marshall, who is Black, is known for his painting work depicting Black people in everyday settings.
Marshall’s “racial justice”-themed panels at the cathedral will replace two, installed in 1953, that depicted slaveholding Confederate generals Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee.
The panels were removed in 2017 after the cathedral concluded that they “are not only inconsistent with our current mission to serve as a house of prayer for all people, but also a barrier to our important work on racial justice and racial reconciliation.”
