Hope and Healing Exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum Open to Holy Cross Community for Free

The Dean’s Office at the College of the Holy Cross is pleased to invite all members of the Holy Cross community to see the exhibition Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500-1800 at the Worcester Art Museum, 55 Salisbury St.

The exhibition, which opened April 3 and continues through Sept. 25, represents an unprecedented collaboration between Holy Cross, Clark University, and the Worcester Art Museum. The exhibition explores art’s role in envisioning hope and healing in an age marked by outbreaks of plague. Bringing together 37 works from more than 30 different lenders in the United States and from abroad, the show includes works by major artists such as Tintoretto, Mignard, Van Dyck, Tiepolo and Canaletto.

Students, faculty, staff and administration have unlimited free access to the museum during the first two months of the show, April and May 2005, by showing their College ID.

Fr. Thomas Worcester, S.J., associate professor of history at Holy Cross and one of the four curators and organizers of the show, has been part of planning the exhibition since 2000. The three other curators and organizers of the show are: Gauvin Bailey, associate professor of art history at Clark; Pamela Jones, associate professor of art history at UMass-Boston; and Franco Mormando, associate professor of romance languages at Boston College.

These faculty also served as the editors of the exhibition catalogue, published by the museum and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. Copies are available in the Holy Cross bookstore.

"The exhibition examines, in an interdisciplinary fashion, how painting offered hope in a time of epidemic disease - specifically plague," Fr. Worcester says. "The show sheds light not only on historical questions for the late Renaissance and Baroque periods, but on a much broader range of critical issues regarding fears and hopes, life and death, religion and society, art and suffering, in many eras, including our own."

Among the events scheduled around the Hope and Healing exhibition is the Annual New England Renaissance Conference on April 23. Titled "Piety and Plague in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe," it will bring together eight speakers for this scholarly conference of Renaissance specialists. Although there is no fee to attend the conference, it is necessary to register as seats are limited and a buffet lunch will be served. Registrations are first-come, first-served. To register contact the conference secretary, Susan Pfeiffer, at spfeiffe@holycross.edu.

This year’s International Word and Image Conference will also reflect on the Hope and Healing exhibition. Holy Cross, in an ongoing collaboration with the University of Paris 7 Denis-Diderot, will host the conference, "Illness: Representations in the Arts and Literature." The conference, held June 27 - 29, 2005, will feature as its plenary speaker Professor Elaine Scarry, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, and author of The Body in Pain (1985); On Beauty and Being Just (1999); and Dreaming by the Book (1999). Thirty-two scholars representing major research universities from France, French Guyana, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Spain, Argentina, and the United States will be in attendance.

The exhibition and associated events have been made possible, in part, by generous support from Atlantic Tele-Network, Inc. and the National Endowment for the Arts.

For more information about the exhibition and these events, please visit the following websites:

Related information:

# Hope and Healing feature in Holy Cross Magazine