Gary Monroe's first New York solo show consised of work on paper concerned with a group of evangelical Christians who handle snakes as part of their devotional practice. Monroe lives in Knoxville, Tenn., not far from southern Appalachia, home to the snake handlers. The snake-handling ritual is based on a passage from the Bible (Mark 16:17) that states, "They shall take up serpents." The sect was founded by George Went Hensley in 1880 (he later died of a snakebite) as a new form of religious expression based on local rural culture at a time when the industrial revolution had ...

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