May is the month traditonally dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Over the coming weeks, I will be posting biographical sketches of three artists, new to the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, who have revitalized Marian portraiture in unconventional ways, placing the Mother of Christ in contemporary contexts and offering her to the viewer as a universal exemplar of Christian spirituality and the overlooked women of sacred history. Italian Artist Rosellina Avoscan ran away from an abusive home as a teenager, working her way across Europe until she was able to study art in London. She understands all too well what she calls “the loneliness of not belonging to anybody or anywhere" and creates artworks devoted to the plight of immigrants and refugees to stir the conscience of viewers to the suffering of millions of our displaced global neighbors. Avoscan depicts numerous modern-day Madonnas modeled on these homeless, as we see in her panel painting, 2019 Years Later (left), where the gold traditionally found in holy images of the Virgin and the Baby Jesus glimmers in a Mylar thermal blanket covering a Syrian mother and child who survived the sea journey to a European safe haven. (John Kohan)