Dr. James Cooper leads by example

As the rector and chief executive of New York City’s venerable Trinity Wall Street Church, Dr. James H. Cooper has overseen all aspects of the organization, from Trinity Church and St. Paul’s Chapel to St. Margaret’s House, since his appointment in 2004.

Cooper, who received his Master of Divinity and his Doctor of Ministry from the Virginia Theological Seminary, has a long and distinguished record of service which spans more than 30 years in the clergy.

Among his past accomplishments, Cooper helped to grow his parish in Ponte Vedra, Fla., from a membership of 700 to more than 5,500, and he founded a nonprofit to provide quality health care to the region’s aging population.

In addition, he helped provide growth money for new churches in Nigeria, Kenya and Spain while also establishing missions and other facilities in Tanzania, Bolivia, the Bahamas and Cuba.
As the current head of Trinity, Cooper has helped to carry on the church’s original mission to serve the poor and isolated. The church was established in 1697, predating the city of New York.
Cooper has worked tirelessly alongside groups including the Downtown Alliance, an organization that provides funding to house the homeless in lower Manhattan. The church also gave a leadership grant to the Downtown Alliance’s Back to Business grant program, which is focused on helping small businesses in Zone A and lower Manhattan recover from the effects of Hurricane Sandy.

In addition, Cooper helped to steer funding of $250,000 to the Robin Hood Foundation, supporting the transition of veterans returning from active duty in Afghanistan.

Other initiatives Cooper has lent his time and talent to include a Relief Bureau to counsel the sick and jobless, food pantries and soup kitchens at Trinity chapels around the city, global grant programs that award millions both abroad and to vital programs in New York as well as the massive relief effort and shelter the church provided to the rescue workers at Ground Zero after 9/11.
When the John Heuss House, a day shelter for the homeless, was forced to close several years ago, Cooper and the church responded by opening Charlotte’s Place, a drop-in and welcome center for all visitors to the community. Further, a brown-bag lunch program was started on the front steps of Trinity, which distributes hundreds of bag lunches each week to anyone in need.

Also of importance is Cooper’s skill as a financial manager, carefully managing Trinity’s Grants Program, which has funded more than $72 million in programs in some 85 countries around the world since 1972.

But of all his responsibilities, perhaps the most important is the management of Trinity Real Estate, which handles the parish’s 6 million square feet of commercial real estate in Lower Manhattan. The income generated from the church’s real estate holdings, which Trinity has held for more than 300 years, enables the organization to sustain and develop programs and ministries around the world.
Honored recently at a Manhattan awards ceremony, sponsored by the Federation of Manhattan Welfare Agencies, Cooper made some thoughtful remarks.

“We have great expectations of each other,” Cooper said. He noted that while Trinity has “wonderful ministries, grand programs and buildings,” they will ultimately be known “not by those ministries and programs or buildings; we will be known by the love we have for one another.”

He added that “love endures all things, and it is only love that never ends. God will make the path straight again, will rise up the valleys and take boulders and mountains and throw them into the sea. … We are part of it simply because we love one another.”

Cooper is also known in the interfaith community for the work he began shortly after his arrival to push for increased communication and understanding of differences that arose among persons of differing faiths after 9/11.

He continues to reach out to those who speak out about both economic and social injustices.

By Maureen Malarkey

Is religion the new pornography? DC Moore Gallery, pitching its group exhibition of “American (ir)religiosity” in the exhibition Beasts of Revelation, hopes so.

Censorship battles over sexually explicit imagery have been won. That old X-rated thrill is gone. Nowadays, organs and orifices are as transgressive as your parish bulletin. Only demon blasphemy has enough life left to pinch-hit for beaver shots and bull whips—or so the gallery wants to think.

On one level, Beasts of Revelation is a standard publicity caper, the kind that banks on the Catholic League to rise to the bait. Nothing boosts box office like a picket line of retired Knights of Columbus at the gallery door. Moreover, this is an election year, as civic minds at DC Moore remind us. The gallery is primed for Nov. 6 with latter-day riffs on Christian iconography, stand-ins for the social conservatism identified with a Republican candidacy. To underscore the point, two LDS-raised artists are showcased for their upbringing, not talent.

But where is the sacrilege?

The trumpeted irreverence comes gilded as a testament to “Christianity’s insidious aquifer of metaphorical power.” (Insidious /adj/ 1. cunning, deceitful 2. deleterious.) Downwind of Andres Serrano, Chris Ofili, and a thriving Broadway lampoon of Mormonism, DC Moore’s claim that religion is a taboo subject in the art world is risible. Here, promotional blather about religion diverts attention from the crucial question: Is the art any good?

Some of it is, much is not. Even so, Rosary Society matrons will have a hard time finding offense. This is an unexceptional summertime porridge of appropriations and approximations of traditional iconography. Several pieces achieve a seriousness that is no less real for being unintended. The only insidious item on show is the press release.

Roger Brown’s “The Beast Rising From the Sea” (1983), the keynote piece, holds its ground as a modern version of an ancient motif. The seven-headed symbol for Satan and his wiles has warned against mistaken conceptions of God—i.e., against idolatry— since The Book of Revelation was written early in the common era.

Chris Hammerlein follows Brown with a ceramic Whore of Babylon astride a suitably grotesque version of the Beast. The sculpture accompanies a suite of sketchy illustrations of the Passion. Hammerlein’s line is weak, yet several of the compositions do justice to the emotional tenor of the Stations of the Cross.

Robert Smithson’s expressionist drawing “Christ Carrying the Cross” (1960) is a glad surprise. A bent, bloody, striped figure, rendered in red-purple ink, evokes the lethal brutality of a Roman scourging. It recalls Lovis Corinth’s “The Red Christ” (1922) and reveals how far Smithson traveled to become himself.

Kay Rosen’s stylish stained-glass design using the letters of the name Jesus would be welcome in rectories anywhere. By contrast, Dana Frankfort’s graphic and semantic nullity, “TSIRHC” (2011)—Christ spelled backward— suggests a high schooler trying to be cool. Carrie Mayer’s portrait drawing “Head” (1999) is eligible for inclusion on the assumption that a generic Haight Ashbury melancholic, ’60s vintage, is a ringer for a 1st-century Palestinian Jew. It is a popular cliché, a secular parallel to the products of Sulpician piety.

Erika Rothenberg’s signboard announcing parish activities in moveable letters is a delicious send-up of typical church notice boards. Social service (“Tues: Eating Disorders; Wed: Abusive Spouse; Sat: Soup Kitchen”) takes precedence over prayer; the social gospel trumps the Synoptics more often than not. Janine Antoni’s photo of a woman cradling her own leg in the attitude of a madonna and child is a pitch-perfect image of amour propre. Meant to burlesque a conventional composition, “Coddle” (1999) rises in spite of itself to a sharp comment on narcissism. The Spirit blows where it will.

Art is both the work of hands—craft—and an act of mind. Joyce Kozloff’s “JEEZ” (2012) runs a deficit either way. Its inane gigantism and crude execution is the apotheosis of every adolescent, aimless or resentful thread elsewhere in the ensemble. Unequal to the grandeur of the inheritance it cannibalizes, Kozloff’s altarpiece, an anarchy of fragments and fribbles, tries an end-run around creative debility. Enamored as we are of the idea that art is a civilizing force, we forget that barbarians, too, have their art.

Beasts of Revelation Through Aug. 3. DC Moore Gallery, 535 W. 22 St., 212-247-2111, dcmooregallery.com.