If you live in the Crestview neighborhood, you have probably seen the giant Adirondack chair that sits outside of Violet Crown City Church. Sometimes it’s covered in rainbows. Sometimes it’s painted with a message calling for gun reform. And sometimes it features references to popular 2000s sitcoms.
Colin Cooper has lived in the neighborhood for almost two decades and wanted to know more about the chair he drives past. He said, weirdly, he now associates the chair with the Crestview neighborhood in a way he cannot explain.
“I want to know who paints it, where do the ideas come from, and why is it a chair?” Colin asked.
To answer his question, I went to Violet Crown City Church and met the man behind it all: Pastor Jay Cooper.
Jay and Colin share the same last name, but they are not related.
Jay has been the church’s pastor for a little over six years, but the chair is nearly a decade old. One night, while going through a divorce, he was out for a walk when he came across a pile of discarded wood.
“I’ve always been a bit of a dumpster diver, and so whenever I see, especially like furniture that’s been put on the side of the road or old wood, I am on it,” Jay said. “If you’re in the carpentry world, it’s called upcycling. I guess in the Christian world, it’d be called resurrection.”
Without much of a plan, Jay said he decided to make a chair out of the wood. It sat outside his home in Clarksville, and later Brentwood, for a couple of years before he was granted permission from the church to sit it outside on the lawn.
“How the church said yes, you can put that chair there, is still a mystery to me,” Jay said. “They’re like ‘sure, he’s excited, just let him do it.’”
Jay Cooper has painted more than 125 designs on the chair.
The chair has featured more than 125 designs by Jay. He said he comes up with and paints every design himself and is surprised at how the chair has “taken on a life of its own.”
“I used to only paint it about once a month in the beginning; however, as you’re probably aware, the world has gotten a little crazy, and now ideas just come to me in my sleep,” Jay said.
When Jay and I met up, the chair was painted to look like a pair of jean shorts sitting in a shower. He even cut up an actual shower curtain and glued it to the chair — a reference to the 2000s sitcom Arrested Development.
Although I tried really hard, I think I may be too young to get it.
Jay said his first few designs were lighthearted, like TV references and celebrating holidays, but over time, the designs have become more “saucy.”
The chair has been painted with designs calling for gun reform, celebrating Pride Month, supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, and recently, denouncing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“Whether they’re justice-related or supporting the sacred worth of all human beings in response to something the president says, which we believe is contrary to the way of Jesus, then I do put it up there,” he said.
The chair has had messages saying “Thou shall not worship guns,” and “I pair well with banned books.” One of his designs in January said, “We want snow, not ICE,” in response to multiple deaths at the hands of ICE in Minneapolis.
Jay has a theory that the only thing keeping the chair together is the layers of paint from his art over the past 10 years.
“I think we need to respond in ways that love and support our neighbor, and at that particular time, we believed that the tactics of ICE were so far out of line and dangerous that we needed to respond in some way,” Jay said.
Although the public’s response to the chair is usually positive, and even draws newcomers into the church, Jay said that is not always the case. He said people have sent letters and called the church demanding he apologize to the neighborhood for some of his saucier designs.
“There have been a couple times where people have vandalized the chair,” Jay said. “Not the end of the world. I wish they would have just had a conversation with me about it, but that’s not oftentimes how people operate.”
But Jay said he will not apologize.
“We don’t put up messages just to be provocative, but more to encourage those who generally are not supported by this administration or by society,” he said. “For me, it’s really important that our church be seen as like a house on the street, and so like everyone else, are we a good neighbor or are we not?”
Three days after talking to Jay, I met Colin at the chair. It was already repainted with a new motif. I told Colin about Jay and how the ideas come from all over, including his dreams. The only thing I could not answer was why exactly Jay chose to build a chair. But even Jay does not know.
Colin told me he does not go to church or consider himself religious, but he appreciates what the chair brings to the neighborhood and the conversations it can spark.
“There was a design supporting marriage equality, and I had my nephew in the car, and he asked about it,” Colin said. “I thought it was nice that we could have that discussion and have it prompted in a way that I could talk about issues that he may not hear about otherwise.”