Back in February, we were visiting our daughter and her family in the DC area. One day, I ran over to my old stomping grounds (as an Army reservist doing annual duty at the Pentagon in the 1990s). I started at the Marine Corp Exchange (MCX) at Henderson Hall over in Virginia and ended up in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in downtown Washington. The collection is vast, and only a small percentage of its holdings are on display at any given moment. Those you see there are divided into categories, e.g., political and military figures, entertainers, scientists, and, on this visit, I saw renderings (whether sculpture, painting, or photograph) of General (and later President) Dwight Eisenhower; Linus Pauling, with two Nobel Prizes, one for chemistry, one for peace; and march composer John Philip Sousa. Distinguished black Americans such as Harriet Tubman and George Washington Carver are represented in the collection, but the much-larger-than life images I saw prominently displayed were those of rapper L. L. Cool J and race-grievance activist Ta-Nehisi Coates, the latter hanging near a parody of Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, but with Samurai manning the boat—a “consciousness-raising” piece about the contribution of Asian-Americans, or something.

At the far end of the museum, there were hundreds of paintings bunched in big glass display cases, possibly relocated from the Renwick Gallery, undergoing renovation. Therein, I saw work by two of my favorite black artists Henry Ossawa Tanner (son of an AME bishop and frequent painter of biblical scenes) and Jacob Lawrence (known especially for portraying the “Great Migration” of Southern rural blacks to the urban, industrial North). And there I saw a painting by an old favorite, Howard Finster, a mystical Baptist preacher from Georgia, who made it only to the sixth grade. I’ve seen his work all over the place, including New York’s American Folk Art Museum at its original location next to the Museum of Modern Art on the Upper West Side. 

His work is rustic and fundamentalist, but some very cool people have used it, most notably the rock groups R.E.M. and Talking Heads, who’ve put his painting on album covers. The one he did for Talking Heads’ Little Creatures collection won Rolling Stone’s  Album of the Year honors. On this day, I came across one entitled Vision of a Great Gulf on Planet Hell, and it pulled no punches. Yes, there are misspellings in the generous text (‘fatale,’ ‘Saten,’ ‘distirbs,’ ‘buisness,’ and ‘want’ for ‘won’t), but Finster manifests biblical reverence and wisdom untouched by the likes of Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins (whose just said he appreciates Christianity at the cultural level) and Carleton Pearson, the Pentecostal megachurch pastor in Tulsa whose dismissal of hell gained friendly coverage on NPR and a movie aired on Netflix.

Here's a sampling of Finster’s text from the painting that you see here. (It may disappear before long since those attacking so-called Christian Nationalism might have it cast out of this National Gallery.

• If you make it to hell, you can say Howard told you about it on earth.

• People who made a fatale mistake . . .

• Clocks are useless here.

• The Devil has run out of work, has nothing to do but kick around hell.

• Devil of fear who distirbs the whole world and threatens the peace of earth people. May God cast him soon into the Lake of Fire.

• If a man believed in hell, he would try to avoid going there.

• Serpents, Saten, and devils will be cursed by those they deceived.

• No more revivals.

• Some want pay a dime to stay out of hell, but when they get there, they would offer everything in hell to get out.

• Those who don’t believe in hell will wind up in hell.

• . . . Devil of Confusion jumping from one to another gouging in everybody’s buisness to bring division.