My school created a God.
I am a student at an art university.
There is an infamous building on our campus, called “Montgomery House” or more commonly, “Monty.” Monty is the building for animation, game design, special effects, sound design, and basically everything that requires highly powerful, highly specialized computers and software. The building is infamous for a couple of reasons. It’s located pretty far away from any other building, for one. The building itself used to be a coffin factory, no joke. Another is the building has no windows. None. There are also no clocks anywhere. Once you enter Monty, you are completely separated from the flow of time and the light of day. Probably the reason Monty is most known though is because students in the “monty majors” have to spend a lot of time there. A lot. It is not uncommon for somebody to spend more than a few days exclusively within the sunless, dark walls of Monty. If you go to the building, it is not surprising to see students sleeping on the floor, on the few chairs available, on the computers. Some bring sleeping bags and rations. Some just forgo sleep, buy espresso shots and work. The entire building just smells of coffee and sweat. It really seems like an exageration, but its not hyperbole.
Why I bring this up is because of something that’s started recenetly. Inside the building, the school has hung up artwork on the walls from other majors as is typical on campus. One of the artworks was a self-portrait painting of a man with long, scraggly brown hair and a full beard looking pensively off into the distance. The painting became known as “Monty Jesus.”
Students, in their desperation for their files to render, or the computers to work, began to offer prayers to Monty Jesus. Soon, they began writing their prayers and taping them next to the painting. The wall is now covered, completly plastered, in prayers to Monty Jesus for things like “Fix the wifi” and “let me live through finals” and more simply “help me.” Candles have been added. Literal candles are placed around Monty Jesus in hopes he will help them.
This is how religions are born. Monty Jesus is considered a “joke”, but people at Monty still hold…. quite a lot of superstitious faith in the concept. There is even talk of a “Monty Satan” that creates software failures. It might be in jest, but these students really are hoping for some force to help them. And they’ve given it a name, an image, and respect. Monty Jesus is real, and I’m sure of it. The desperate students have created their own spirit and their own form of worship, out of need.
Religion, spirituality, didn’t stop being relevant. It didn’t stop being something people need and want, and have the desire to create. It’s still happening, and it always will as long as their are people. The spirit of creation, new deities and new worship, is alive and well today and should not be ignored simply because it is “new” or “a joke.”
Monty Jesus is Real and Strong and Our Friend
SCAD is such a weird and magical place.
As soon as I saw “Monty” I knew this was about my school
I go to this school and I can confirm he is real. Another weird happening that occurred in the dorm adjacent to Monty is the smashed fly incident. Basically, someone smashed a fly on the stairway wall in the dorm and, because no janitor in this building ever bothers to thoroughly clean the place, the fly stayed there for a good few weeks. Eventually, one of the students wrote “ART” next to the fly with a sharpie, and a few days after that, someone made a tiny frame and name tag to accompany the art piece
Eventually some fool took this beautiful art piece down, and someone wrote a goddamn article about it in our school newspaper
which prompted several students to erect a mini shrine on the stairwell in honor of the smashed fly. Art school is truly a magical place.
Your school is a microcosm of how human culture develops, incredible.
I was going to apply to SCAD but decided against it because I would never be able to afford it and now I am low key regretting that decision.
I recently graduated from SCAD and I believe it should be studied by sociologists. It’s truly a spectacle what can happen when a gaggle of overworked and undersocialized art nerds are confined to separate buildings scattered far and wide across one of the US’s oldest and supposedly most haunted cities.
Monty Jesus is the most well-known phenomenon, but I believe every major building has their own strange traditions and superstitions. I studied illustration, and as such I spent most of my time in Haymans Hall, a tiny 3-story brick building wedged behind the SCAD gift shop that used to be either an orphanage or a hospital depending on what source I’m looking at. There was a professor who worked there when I went named Ryan (for those who have never been to art school, most of the professors will insist you call them by their first name). He was incredibly popular with many of the students for his polite and encouraging but no-bullshit attitude when it came to helping improve their work, as well as his mischievous personality and his tendency to pull pranks on unsuspecting tour groups. There are a few stories about weird things he did in front of groups of potential SCAD applicants touring the building, but only one seemed to spread past the Haymans kids.
So right when you walk in the building, there’s a stairwell with a 2-story wall on one side, which is taken up by an art installation consisting entirely of jeans. Nothing else, just. like..a hundred or so pairs of blue jeans bolted to the wall. Now SCAD doesn’t have a dress code for the students past “as long as it’s legal to wear in public,” but apparently the faculty is not allowed to wear jeans; they have to wear slacks or khakis or skirts. So fuckin Ryan catches a tour group when they’re near the stairwell and casually tells the kids there that the Wall of Jeans is actually jeans that were confiscated from professors who were caught out of dress code. Like the dean physically took their jeans and had them stapled to the wall (in reality the jeans were all purchased from local thrift stores).
I don’t know if Ryan came up with the confiscation rumor or if he simply perpetuated it, all I know is that outside the illustration students, there grew this rumor about this ominous wall where the higher-ups would send the confiscated jeans of insubordinate professors to be mounted like weird trophies as a warning to any professor who defied the rules like SCAD is wild, y’all.
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