Smiles Meyer recasts ‘The Last Supper’ with trans models

Smiles Meyer placed trans models inside Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” in a 2024 photographic project, Hyperallergic reported in an Oct. 19 feature and interview.

By reworking a 1495–98 painting, the Los Angeles artist links personal gender identity to a broader queer and trans practice of using religious scenes, including work by Elizabeth Ohlson Wallin.

Meyer, a trans photographer and musician in Los Angeles, grew up in San Diego and in a conservative Catholic environment, according to Hyperallergic. “I was first in love with words,” Meyer told the publication, describing an early ambition to become a poet.

After coming out as queer around age 18, Meyer experienced severe depression and began taking medication, Hyperallergic reported. “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 said. “It was a year of me feeling creatively constipated.”

Meyer began taking photographs in 2018, first using printed images as material for collage. The practice developed into a photography career that Hyperallergic described as approaching a decade.

The 2024 project, titled “The First Gathering,” follows other religiously inflected work by Meyer, including a “Mary + I” cover and nightclub exorcism images made for performance artist Maris. Meyer told Hyperallergic that Judith Butler’s writing helped shape their thinking about “how trans people appropriate the power of creation.”

Meyer said that framework led them to reconsider “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.”

Source: feature and interview, Hyperallergic, Oct. 19, 2026