Smiles Meyer Recasts "The Last Supper" With Trans Models

By Olivia Hart

In 2024, Los Angeles-based trans photographer and musician Smiles Meyer staged "The First Gathering," a photographic recreation of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" (1495–98) cast entirely with trans models. The work places Meyer within a growing lineage of queer and trans artists who visualize their identities through longstanding religious imagery — a tradition that includes Elizabeth Ohlson Wallin, whose Last Supper recreations and other religious tableaux drew outrage in Serbia as far back as 2012.

Meyer's series is not a one-off provocation. It builds on earlier projects such as the "Mary + I" cover and nightclub exorcism shots made for performance artist Maris, works through which Meyer unpacks religious trauma in art that explores and celebrates their gender identity.

How did photography replace poetry?

Meyer grew up in San Diego, California, wanting to be a poet. "I was first in love with words," they told Hyperallergic in an interview. That ambition stalled after Meyer came out as queer around age 18 and began taking antidepressants for severe depression.

"With the antidepressants, it felt like it soaked up my sadness but also soaked up any ability to write, which is something that a lot of artists struggle with," Meyer explained. "It was a year of me feeling creatively constipated."

The remedy arrived in 2018, when Meyer picked up a camera. Their earliest method was collage: cutting up printed photographs and rearranging the pieces into stories they couldn't write. The practice ended the day they took a picture they considered too good to butcher. That single frame launched what is now a photography career stretching nearly a decade — a medium swap, in effect, that traded the page for the lens.

For an artist who lost words to medication, the visual route has proven durable. Seven years on from that first untouchable print, Meyer is restaging Renaissance masterpieces.

What does Butler have to do with divinity?

Meyer traces their interest in deconstructing cisgender divinity partly to Judith Butler. Raised in the Catholic Church, Meyer credits Butler's writing with inspiring them to consider "how trans people appropriate the power of creation."

Butler's frameworks, Meyer said, encouraged a reframing of "what it means to be divine as not something that we associate with Jesus or the God in the sky but instead something that lives within all of us."

That is the thesis under the theatrics. For Meyer, art is an act of divine transformation — both creatively and bodily, a claim the artist's own post-top-surgery self-portrait makes plainly enough.

The intellectual scaffolding keeps the work from being mere icon-swapping. There's a real tradition here, and Meyer knows it: queer and trans artists reshaping divinity in their own image, from Wallin's transgender Jesus onward.

Where does the work go from here?

"The First Gathering" suggests a photographer building a coherent project rather than chasing single images. With a decade of practice behind them and a conceptual frame sturdy enough to carry Leonardo, Meyer's deconstruction of the divine looks set to keep expanding.