This painting of Miriam's, "Jesus and the Opossum" was originally done as a commission for a church. It depicts the words of Jesus in the parable in Matthew 25:40, "If you've done it for the least of these, you have done it to me."
In the painting is Jesus holding an opossum, a common but often misunderstood and disliked animal in the South. On the right is a cloth over the chair resembling Joseph's coat of many colors. Joseph was a person who was also misunderstood and rejected by his community. You can also see a dog (brown) and a cat (blue), more traditionally accepted house pets next to Jesus on the sofa, but it is the opossum that he is cradling.
You also notice the more traditional halo of light around Jesus' head that is found in many early Christian iconography. This light illuminates the opossum and the foreground scene.
This foreground scene plays out with people unaware carrying on their daily lives in the street below which divides the painting. The church is set at a distance from Jesus and the opossum. The street represents a journey or path people are on in life, often seeing the visible representation of faith in the physical church while the more intimate of faith is "across the street and hidden from them".
The church leaders rejected the work. It has been on loan to a late friend's family of Miriam's who connected deeply with the work.
- Subject Matter: Biblical
- Inventory Number: 261