Janet McKenzie was born in Brooklyn and raised in and around New York City. She studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Art Students League, and was the recipient of the Edward McDowell Traveling Scholarship. For many years she has lived and worked in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.
In the mid-nineties, Ms. McKenzie began to incorporate diversity, children, and symbolic imagery into her work portraying women. She is well known for her internationally acclaimed painting Jesus of the People, which was the first-place winner of the National Catholic Reporter’s global competition, “Jesus 2000.” She was invited to be the 2013 William Belden Noble Lecturer at Harvard University’s Memorial Church. In 2017, Memorial Church commissioned The Divine Journey—Companions of Love and Hope, a new painting which honors diversity and Radcliffe/Harvard women past and present.
Ms. McKenzie’s work is included in numerous collections throughout the US. The Basilica of Saint Mary in Minneapolis holds 17 of her paintings in their collection. Her painting Sanctuary was displayed on the pulpit for the funerals of assassinated Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, in June 2025. She states, “As an artist I work to be a voice for inclusion and positive change. My art comes from that sacred place within each of us where we exist beyond gender, race, and perceived differences.”
Our conversation with Ms. McKenzie touched on her early life and studies, painting as a weekly practice and the “transition” she makes between her home and studio, and art as a form of sacred activism that can embolden people emotionally and spiritually. She also shared how she approaches working with models, why it is important for her to create compositions that people of all backgrounds can see themselves in, and the ways she prayerfully attunes herself to the evolution of each painting as “one thing builds after the next.”
We could say McKenzie’s famous painting Jesus of the People (2000) took up Millais’ mantle, showing Jesus as truly “one of us” in a contemporary context. In her powerful painting Woman Offered #5, McKenzie asks the viewer to take the next theological step.
Here McKenzie paints in her impeccably skilled manner a person both dignified and suffering. She need not add a halo or give a religious name to the woman she depicts. She simply portrays a Black woman in a cruciform position, in a stark silhouette of black and white.
Can this woman image Christ to us? Must this woman be an image of Christ for us to care? Can she not just be herself, in all her unique specificity—a particular Black woman with her particular hardships and struggles? Would that be enough to stir our hearts and minds? And what is she “offered” for, as the title of the painting proposes? Is she offered for our sins? Is she offered for our selfishness and greed? Is she offered for our failures to see all people as made “in [God’s] image, according to [God’s] likeness”? (Gen. 1:26–27).
— John Christman, U.S. Catholic, February 23, 2023
Additional Resources:
Official website of Janet McKenzie
The Divine Journey: A Painter’s Mission (documentary on the commission for Harvard University’s Memorial Church)
Art That Surrounds Us (video on the acquisition of the painting Sanctuary by the Basilica of St. Mary, Minneapolis)
HOPE (video presentation of Ms. McKenzie’s work in the world of vigils and protests)
The Way of the Cross: The Path to New Life (collaboration with Sr. Joan Chittister)
