Nicholas Leeper, SJ: All Too Human
The Fordham University Visual Arts Program is proud to present Nicholas Leeper, SJ: All Too Human, an exhibition of paintings that bring Byzantine iconography into conversation with pop culture, including twentieth-century cinema, celebrities, and Pop Art. Co-organized by Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, Arts & Sciences, and Vincent Stracquadanio, Gallery Programmer, the exhibition will open with a public reception on Monday, November 23rd at 6:00 PM and remain on view through early 2027 at the Ildiko Butler Gallery at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus. Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture will also host a public talk and conversation with Nick Leeper, SJ, at the Lincoln Center campus on the evening of Thursday, January 28, 2027 at 6:00 PM.
In Leeper’s paintings, religious figures are portrayed through celebrities and characters drawn from mid-century pop culture. In St. Rita of Cascia, Marilyn Monroe is depicted as the patron saint of desperate cases and impossible causes, holding the rose associated with one of St. Rita’s final miracles. Monroe’s constructed glamour and private suffering meet a saint who endured loss, violence, and a difficult marriage. Their dissimilarity opens a way of seeing both the celebrity and the saint beyond the polished images presented to us.
The exhibition does not canonize celebrities or film characters. Instead, it uses the distance between the actor, role, and saint to give us a new perspective on who the saint is as a human being. Leeper, a Jesuit scholastic (priest-in-training) studying at Boston College’s Clough School for Theology and Ministry, draws on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s idea of “dissimilar similarities,” in which partial, incomplete, and surprising representations can disclose deeper truths that exceed depiction. Because Christian tradition understands the saints as images of Christ, each intersection of celebrity and saint may disclose some deeper truth about the person of Christ whom the saint embodied.
The title of the show echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits and points to the exhibition’s central tension: saints are revered as exceptional figures whose holiness can seem unattainable in our own time and circumstances, yet their sanctity is worked out through God’s grace and their humanity, not in spite of either. By portraying saints as familiar celebrities, Leeper resists the safe distance created when holiness becomes historical or hagiographical.
The exhibition also confronts the hypocrisy Jesus condemns in Matthew 23, where the scribes and Pharisees decorate monuments to the prophets while claiming that they would not have joined their ancestors in persecuting the righteous. The paintings ask which disruptive witnesses viewers admire only after the danger and discomfort have passed, and which they dismiss in the present. Do we know the saints and God personally, or merely know about them, as we know about celebrities admired from a distance?
The show opens amid a return to Roy Lichtenstein in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art is hosting a major retrospective of the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, Like New, which opens October 11, 2026.
Nicholas Leeper, SJ (b. 1992) is a Jesuit scholastic and artist based in Boston. He studies theology at Boston College’s Clough School for Theology and Ministry. He also writes on art and faith for America, the 117-year-old Jesuit review of faith and culture. His recent exhibitions include the 2025 Biennale d’Art Contemporain Sacré in Menton, France, and a May 2026 solo exhibition at The Church of St. Francis Xavier in New York City. His work is held in private collections and has been exhibited in the United States, Peru, Italy, the United Kingdom, and France.
Opening Reception:
Monday, November 23rd at 6:00 PM
Press Preview/Artist Walkthrough:
Tuesday, November 24th at 1:30 PM
Artist Talk:
Thursday, January 28th at 6:00 PM