Ex-voto, painting of rafters, “Chamber of Miracles” in Sanctuary, El Cobre, 1997.

Mexican ex-voto paintings (left & center). Virgin of Charity's Apparition holy card with similar motif (right).

North American secular and religious street shrines in Berkeley, California. The two on the left above constitute a spontaneous neighborhood memorial (2009); the two on the right above and the first three in the row below are part of a series of ephemeral religious street shrines that have appeared every Sunday for the last 12 years in the same location in front of a church (photos 2007-09); Hindu street shrine with ex-votos in tree trunk (below right, 2009).

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Popular ex-votos commonly took the form of oil paintings on a metal plate or canvas representing the event of the supplicant's invocation for help in a crisis and the miraculous intervention by the Virgin or a saint leading to a felicitous resolution. The image is juxtaposed to a text that briefly describes the event in the first person and expresses gratitude for the miracle.

Ex-voto paintings were common in early modern Europe and Spain and became particularly popular in colonial Mexico. Although they can still be found in shrines, many now reside in private collectors' walls. There are no traces of early popular ex-voto paintings in El Cobre's "Chamber of Miracles" but there is a modern rendition of the genre in a canvas painting of rafters leaving Cuba for Miami and facing a crisis in the sea. The ex-voto painting also evokes the iconographical motif of the Virgin's Apparition to the three fishermen in the Nipe Bay. The event portrayed in this painting refers to the rafters' exodus of 1994.

Popular secular and religious shrines can spontaneously appear in streets and public places too. Images, notes, flowers, candy and food, veladoras and other tokens memorialize different kinds of events (death, the place of an accident, a promise, a weekly commitment). On the left, lower rows, are some current examples of secular and religious popular shrines in the streets of Berkeley, California.

OF INTEREST:

Ex-votos exhibition

Vision related ex-votos in Europe