Art Director Resigns Over Chocolate Jesus

An Easter-season exhibit of a life-size chocolate sculpture of a naked Jesus at a Manhattan art gallery has cancelled and it's artistic director resigned after an outcry by Catholics.

The artistic director of the gallery resigned in protest of the cancellation. The sculpture, My Sweet Lord, by international artist Cosimo Cavallaro was to be exhibited for each day next week in a street-level window of the Roger Smith Lab Gallery in Midtown Manhattan.

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has written to 500 religious and secular organizations and has called for a boycott of the affiliated Roger Smith Hotel.

Kiera McCaffrey, a spokeswoman for the right-wing group, says it is delighted with the outcome. "We're glad that they came to their senses," she said.. "[It is] an assault on Christians during Holy Week. They would never dare do something similar with a chocolate statue of the prophet Mohammad naked with his genitals exposed during Ramadan," she said.

Cardinal Edward Egan, the Archbishop of New York, called the sculpture "scandalous" and a "sickening display".

The gallery's artistic director, Matthew Semler does not consider the piece irreverent and says he will look for another venue to display it. "I saw it as meditation on all those issues: the fact that it's chocolate, the fact that it's nude, that the chocolate is black," he said.

Cosimo Cavallaro, born 1961 in Montreal, Canada, is best known for his large-scale artistic "installations" using food,. He is an Italian-Canadian artist, filmmaker and sculptor. He is known for his numerous installation art pieces involving real cheese. He has covered a room of the Washington Jefferson Hotel in New York with cheddar cheese in 1999. Two years later he sprayed cheese over the entire interior of a house in Wyoming. His works also includes a series of photographs of the iconic 1960s model Twiggy draped in cheese and covering the inside of another New York City hotel room with melted mozzarella.

Other famous New York clashes between art and religion include then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani's attempted withdrawal of a grant from the Brooklyn Museum of Art for a painting "elephant Dung Mary", depicting the Virgin Mary as a black woman splattered with elephant dung and adorned with cut-outs from pornographic magazines. Current Mayor Michael Bloomberg approaches controversy differently.. "If you want to give the guy some publicity, talk more about it, make a big fuss," he said.

"If you want to really hurt him, don't pay attention."