This contemporary Jesus arrives as a young gay man in a modern big city in “The Passion Series” by Douglas Blanchard. The paintings present a new and liberating vision of the last days of Jesus, including Palm Sunday, the Last Supper and the arrest, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection.

“Christ is one of us in my paintings,” says Blanchard. “In his sufferings, I want to show him as someone who fully experiences and understands what it is to be an unwelcome outsider.” Blanchard, an art professor and self-proclaimed “very agnostic believer,” used the series to deal with his own struggles of faith as a New Yorker who witnessed the terrorist attacks of September 11th.