Who Am I to Judge?

The angel blows his trumpet. It is the twentieth card — Judgment — the moment of reckoning, of rising, of being called to account. Kathryn Cirincione has spent a lifetime absorbing the news of the world: from the streets of Medellín where she served in the Peace Corps, to the piazzas of Verona where she taught, to the windswept coast of Bolinas where she prints each morning. She knows that the trumpets don't always call the righteous forward. Below the luminous, gold-haloed angel — wings spread wide, cross-banner clutched to his chest — she has placed a photograph. A mother. Her children. A handwritten sign: '4 Children For Sale. Inquire Within.' The image is historical, an American Depression-era photograph that broke hearts when it first appeared. Set against the blaze of the celestial, it breaks them again. And again. The question Cirincione has written in pencil below her signature — 'Who am I to judge' — is not an absolution. It is an indictment of silence. This is art that carries the weight of ancestry and the ache of the present in a single frame. It is the legacy of her Italian church-mural forebears — masters of narrative, symbol and spiritual drama — turned toward the wounds of the contemporary world. To own this print is to hold that tension, and to accept the question she leaves unanswered.