The Angry Christ

Abstract

This essay revolves around a remarkable religious mural in the Philippines known as The Angry Christ. Commissioned for a chapel built to service the workers of an industrial sugar refinery on the agricultural island of Negros, the mural was painted in 1950 by the queer, Filipino-American modernist Alfonso Ossorio. Examining Ossorio's artwork in relation to its immediate environment, this essay accounts for some of the multiple narrative threads that cross through it, entangling questions of Modernism and spirituality, queerness and class struggle, sugar and death.