Hammer Projects: Renata Petersen

The source material for The Secret Gospel Church of Phallic Worship (2025) by Mexican artist Renata Petersen (b. 1993, Guadalajara, Mexico) is an aggregate of archival materials, including pamphlets, publications, photographs, and other ephemera, used by new religious movements and fraternal orders in California to spread their ideologies and recruit new members. The installation of comic-inspired drawings on ceramic tiles tells the story of groups such as David Brandt Berg’s The Children of God, the People’s Temple of Jim Jones, and Unarius (Universal Articulate Interdimensional Understanding of Science). The artist’s iconographic study recontextualizes the figureheads and doctrines of cults, secret societies, and fringe religious groups in a nonhierarchical, unified field. The title, The Secret Gospel Church of Phallic Worship, is taken from St. Priapus Church, a San Francisco-based religious organization founded in 1979. The still-active church preaches phallic worship and avoidance of sexual frustration to its congregation of mostly gay men. Such themes of sexual and libidinal liberation permeate the history unearthed by Petersen. 

Enveloping the walls of the gallery, the installation recalls religious spaces such as the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy, where, in the early fourteenth century, Giotto di Bondone covered every surface with frescoes depicting the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ. Petersen’s church-like environment is similarly immersive and visually overwhelming, like many experiences in the twenty-first century—religious and otherwise. Petersen’s depiction of “sacred stories” of the twentieth century teems with polygamy, avarice, sexual exploitation, and the hippie aesthetics that characterize the California spirit of religious exploration. The Source Family’s infamous leader, Father Yod, appears at the installation’s center, a conceptual focal point that Giotto reserved for Jesus Christ. Petersen’s centering of Yod—whose vision extended beyond a spiritual commune and into psychedelic rock music, entrepreneurialism, and health food—draws a connection between the cult leader’s ambitions and the current atmosphere of lifestyle brands, social influencers, and upscale grocers that sell a way of life to their followers. Petersen’s role becomes that of hagiographer, chronicling the underbelly of contemporary religious thinking and documenting new-age icons that might otherwise be forgotten.

Hammer Projects: Renata Petersen is organized by Aram Moshayedi, independent curator and former Robert Soros Senior Curator, with Nyah Ginwright, curatorial assistant.

Hammer Projects is presented in memory of Tom Slaughter and with support from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation. Lead funding is provided by the Hammer Collective. Major support is provided by Susan Bay Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy. Additional support is from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture.

Special thanks to Cerámica Suro and Amaury Vergara.