In 2008 Father Dennis Dease, president of St. Thomas, along with college and university presidents from across the country, signed the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment. That year the university adopted a Climate Action Plan to achieve carbon neutrality by the year 2035 and to pursue green, sustainable and energy-efficient strategies for all new building projects.

The Environmental Protection Agency yesterday recognized St. Thomas as the 2012-2013 conference champion for using more green power than any other college or university in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.

St. Thomas won the EPA’s College and University Green Power Challenge by using nearly 33 million kilowatt hours of green power in 2012. Collectively, schools in the MIAC purchased nearly 50 million kilowatt hours of green energy.

Windsource, the green-energy program of Xcel Energy, the nation’s top wind-power utility, announced that St. Thomas is the largest purchaser of renewable energy in the company’s history. In the fourth quarter of 2012, 82 percent of the electric power used on the university’s St. Paul and Minneapolis campuses was purchased from the Windsource program.

The Gabriel Kney organ.

The nearly 33 million kilowatt hours of wind-generated power used by St. Thomas last year is equivalent to reducing nearly 57 million pounds of carbon dioxide annually. It also is equivalent to the annual output of five large wind turbines or taking 5,380 passenger vehicles off the road.

And after studying the electric motors that power the 2,786-pipe Gabriel Kney organ in the university’s Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas, Windsource engineers calculated that the amount of wind energy the university purchases each year would be enough to perform Bach’s 15-minute Toccata and Fugue in D minor a total of 1,323,364 times.

Laura McCarten, Xcel Energy regional vice president, will congratulate St. Thomas and present the university with a six-foot model of a wind turbine during an Earth Week celebration at noon Thursday, April 25, on the John P. Monahan Plaza just outside the Anderson Student Center.

All are welcome to the event. Refreshments will include ice cream and, in keeping with the theme of wind-generated power, there will be kites to fly and Lil’ Dutch Maid Almond Windmill Cookies to eat.

If you are reading this at St. Thomas, 82 percent of the energy to run your computer comes from wind farms like this one near Worthington in southwestern Minnesota. Xcel’s Nobles Wind Farm is powered by one of the best wind resources in the country.

A two-minute video about St. Thomas’ use of wind-generated energy, prepared by Windsource, will be shown on the screen in the main atrium of the Anderson Student Center. You also can see the video here.

A Sustainable Saint Paul Award was presented to St. Thomas Wednesday for its work on the Anderson Student Center.

Mayor Chris Coleman and the St. Paul City Council honored the university and Opus Design Build and Opus AE, the contractor and architect, with the Institutional Green Building Design Award at the beginning of the council’s weekly meeting.

“The Anderson Student Center is a testament to the environmentally conscious steps the University of St. Thomas took in building the new student center, and is a great model for institutional green building design,” the city said in honoring the project.

The $66 million, 225,000-square-foot center, located at the corner of Summit and Cretin avenues, opened in January 2012 and last summer was awarded Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) gold certification by the U.S. Green Building Council.

In designing the Anderson Student Center, Opus and St. Thomas participated in Xcel’s Energy Design Assistance Program that helps owners and design teams evaluate energy-conservation strategies. While conservation measures initially were more expensive, it is expected they will provide a projected annual savings of $62,000, with an estimated payback of about four years.

The Recyclemania Tournament, a friendly national and state competition meant to promote recycling and reduce waste at colleges and universities, announced winners on Friday.

In state competition, St. Thomas placed second overall behind the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and was first in four of seven categories. St. Thomas was first in overall pounds of recycled material (116,602 pounds), and first in the per-capita categories for paper, cardboard and bottles and cans.

The Princeton Review on Tuesday announced that St. Thomas is included in its fourth annual “Guide to 322 Green Colleges: 2013 Edition.”  The free guide, according to Princeton Review, “profiles 320 schools in the United States and two in Canada that demonstrate notable commitments to sustainability in their academic offerings, campus infrastructure, activities and career preparation.”

All Earth Week activities at St. Thomas are free and open to the public. They are:

• All week, April 22-26: Tours of the greenhouse, located on the south side of Owens Science Hall on the south campus, will be held from noon to 1 p.m. Monday through Friday of Earth Week. The tours will feature projects of St. Thomas students, staff and faculty. You can see videos about the projects here, here and here. Free garden-soil analyses are available for the first 20 visitors.
• Monday, April 22: Read about Earth Day here.
• Tuesday, April 23: A Green Research Symposium will be held at noon in Room 126 (first-floor auditorium) of the John R. Roach Center for the Liberal Arts.
• Tuesday, April 23: The St. Thomas Green Team will hold a B.Y.O.B (bring your own bottle) event during the noon convo hour in Anderson Student Center. Participants can play water pong; winners receive reusable water bottles.
• Tuesday, April 23: An interdisciplinary panel discussion of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring will be held at 3:30 p.m. in Room 108 (the leather room) of O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library Center. Refreshments will be provided.
• Tuesday, April 23: BEAST (Bicycle Enthusiasts at St. Thomas) will host its annual neighborhood bike ride during Earth Week over the noon convo hour. The ride starts at John P. Monahan Plaza on the university’s lower quadrangle and is open to anyone with a bike and helmet.
• Wednesday, April 24: BEAST (Bicycle Enthusiasts at St. Thomas) will offer free bike tune-ups and repairs for the St. Thomas community. Tune-ups start at 3 p.m. in the BEAST “lair,” located in the basement of Loras Hall on the university’s south campus.
• Thursday, April 25: Green research posters will be on display all day Thursday in Anderson Student Center. The posters will depict environmental research conducted by St. Thomas students.
• Thursday, April 25: A Windsource celebration will be held over the noon convo hour on John P. Monahan Plaza. St. Thomas will receive a six-foot-tall wind-turbine model and will be recognized for being the biggest user of green energy generated by Xcel’s Windsource program. The university also will receive a plaque from the Environmental Protection Agency for winning the College and University Green Power Challenge in the MIAC. There will be displays, kites, ice cream and Lil’ Dutch Maid Almond Windmill Cookies. All are welcome.
• Saturday, April 27: The 21st annual spring cleanup of the east bank of the Mississippi River will be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Volunteers should meet at the monument area at the intersection of Mississippi River Boulevard and Summit Avenue. The annual rite of spring is co-sponsored by the UST Green Team, Recycling Team and the Department of Natural Resources Adopt-a-River program.

A list of St. Thomas Earth Week events can be found here.

Wind turbines at work near Lake Benton in southwestern Minnesota. The town calls itself “the original wind power capital of the Midwest.” The blades are 122 feet long and the turbines are 262 feet tall, nearly as tall as a football field is long.

Imagine a birthday party where you get to open 249 presents. That’s what it was like for art history students at the University of St. Thomas when they removed bubble wrap from each piece in a large collection of modern art donated to the university last year by noted Twin Cities art collector Dolly Fiterman.

The students, enrolled in the graduate seminar “The Craft of Researching Modern Art,” selected and curated 26 of the pieces for the “Insights Into Modern Art” exhibition now on display at the university.

Graduate students in Dr. Craig Eliason’s “The Craft of Researching Modern Art” seminar unwrap some of the 249 works of modern art donated to St. Thomas by Dolly Fiterman.

The exhibition features works in a range of media by 18 famous and not-as-famous artists; it can be seen through May 26 in the lobby gallery of the O’Shaughnessy Educational Center on the university’s St. Paul campus.

An exhibition reception and panel discussion, free and open to the public, will be held at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, April 27, in the auditorium of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center. For more information call (651) 962-5560 or visit this website.

Students in the seminar, led by Dr. Craig Eliason, associate professor of art history at St. Thomas, experienced the full spectrum of mounting an exhibition as part of the department’s program for engaging students through art. They learned to safely handle valuable art, research and write about the artists, prepare descriptive wall labels, develop an exhibition catalog, and finally to mount and display the works.

Art history graduate student Brady King prepares artwork from the Dolly Fiterman collection for display in the O’Shaughnessy Educational Center lobby gallery.

Three of Eliason’s students will discuss what they learned about the artists and their art at the April 27 panel discussion:

• Abby Hall will discuss “Opposites Attract: The Reciprocity of Influence Between Mark Rothko and Milton Avery.”
• Kate Tucker will discuss “Feminist Artistic Lineage: Frida Kahlo Through Miriam Schapiro’s Eyes.”
• Marquette Bateman-Ek will discuss “James Rosenquist: Print Symbols of His Disastrous Decade.”

The modern-art collection Fiterman donated to St. Thomas contains works from the 1950s to the 1990s, with the greatest number from the 1970s and 1980s. Media include lithograph, woodblock print, bronze sculpture, silkscreen, collage, woodcut, engraving, oil stick on paper, and pen and ink on paper.

Best-known nationally or internationally among the artists in the exhibition are Milton Avery (woodblock print), Miriam Schapiro (mixed media), Ilya Bolotowsky (screen print on plexiglass), A. R. Penck (engraving), Nancy Graves (lithograph), Karel Appel (lithograph), James Rosenquist (etching) and Allan D’Archangelo (silkscreen and mixed media).

The best-known local artists represented are Ta-Coumba Aiken (acrylic on canvas), Aribert Munzner (acrylic on paperboard), Diane Katsiaficas (textile), Eugene Larkin (woodcut) and Harriet Bart (bronze sculpture).

Fiterman grew up in Bejou, a small town about 40 miles north of Detroit Lakes. In high school she was a cheerleader, wrote poetry, was Minnesota’s first Wild Rice Queen and won a statewide drama award.  She attended a business college in St. Cloud but transferred to the University of Minnesota to study speech and radio broadcasting.  In addition to working as a secretary and selling clothing at Dayton’s, she acted at local theaters and spent a year modeling in New York. After returning to Minnesota, she met and married her husband, Edward Fiterman.

Art History graduate students mount works of modern art in the lobby gallery of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center. From the left are Lauren Greer, Olga Ivanova and Brady King.

In the 1950s she began to take sculpture and painting classes and to collect works by post-war artists. In 1977 she opened the Dolly Fiterman Fine Arts gallery in downtown Minneapolis; a decade later she moved the gallery to an elegant, former library building she restored on University Avenue in southeast Minneapolis.

Fiterman represented U.S. and European artists, organized exhibitions and contributed generously to arts, educational, religious and civic organizations.

In an introduction to the exhibition catalog, Father Dennis Dease, president of St. Thomas, wrote that he first became acquainted with Fiterman in the early 1990s “when her name was synonymous in the Twin Cities for ‘world-class art collector.’

“Indeed, the gallery that she founded, Dolly Fiterman Fine Arts, has shone an international spotlight on art in the Twin Cities, and her big-hearted philanthropy had bolstered Minnesota’s arts community as well as educational, religious and civic organizations.”

At St. Thomas, she supported Mark Balma’s frescoes in Terrence Murphy Hall in Minneapolis, the restoration of the grotto on the south campus in St. Paul, and the Jay Phillips Center for Jewish-Christian Learning (now Interfaith Learning).

Dolly Fiterman.

Among her first gifts of art to St. Thomas was a carved African Mende mask in 1994, which has been used since for a methods course required for all art history majors and graduate students. Three years later she donated a large oxidized-corten steel sculpture, John Raimondi’s “Cage,” which can be seen on Summit Avenue next to the O’Shaughnessy Science Hall. A model of that sculpture is part of the “Insights Into Modern Art” exhibition.

St. Thomas honored Fiterman with an honorary doctor of humane letters degree in 1997. Her degree citation quoted an art critic’s description of her: “what oil-field workers would call a gusher – a great, explosive, natural well of bubbling energy and impulsive enthusiasm.”

The university also showed its appreciation by offering her a place to live on campus in 2002 while her Minneapolis home was undergoing repairs.

Over the years Fiterman also lent St. Thomas several dozen large paintings that have been displayed in campus buildings. Those works, in addition to the collection of modern art donated a year ago, have been given to the university to create a core teaching collection.

“While she has been generous with a number of educational institutions, her interest in the teaching of visual arts through exposure to high-quality original artworks is strongly visible in her relationship with St. Thomas,” wrote Dr. Shelly Nordtorp-Madson, chief curator and clinical faculty member for the Art History Department.

“The works on display (in O’Shaughnessy Educational Center) are only a fraction of the total pieces of art within the collection,” Nordtorp-Madson wrote, “and plans are already in the works to develop other thematic exhibitions utilizing the art from Dolly Fiterman’s substantial gift. It also is hoped that these works of art can be more extensively exhibited as an educational collection, in a new fine arts center, which would provide even more opportunities for students to learn the skills of working with art.”

According to Dease, “Dolly helped us choose and purchase art for our own collection, and she gave the university nearly 400 works of her own; these include contemporary paintings, drawings and sculpture by some of the world’s best-recognized artists as well as a remarkable collection of African art.”

Dolly Fiterman received her honorary doctorate from St. Thomas in 1997. Her citation described her as a “natural well of bubbling energy and impulsive enthusiasm.”

Fiterman’s contributions to St. Thomas follow two other recent donations to the university’s collection. In 2007, 2,000 carvings and artifacts in the American Museum of Asmat Art were given to St. Thomas by the American Crosier Fathers and Brothers and the Diocese of Agats. In 2008, Frank Gehry’s Winton Guest House was donated by Kirt Woodhouse and moved from Lake Minnetonka to the university’s conference center on the outskirts of Owatonna.

“Together, these collections have created new opportunities for students in art history classes at St. Thomas,” said Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell, the John Ireland Professor and chair of St. Thomas’ Art History Department.

“The donation of artworks from Dolly Fiterman has added valuable, beautiful and interesting works of contemporary art to the collections of the University of St. Thomas,” Eliason wrote in his catalog essay. “The ‘Insights Into Modern Art’ exhibition offers a chance for the public to see choice works from this collection. At the same time, it serves as a showcase of the pedagogy that this gift has enabled.”

The festival, which began at St. Thomas in 1980, traditionally presents a broad range of artistic forms. All of this year’s events are free and open to the public and will be held on the university’s St. Paul campus. They are:

Robin Hemley

Robin Hemley will give a lecture on his book Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 11, in the auditorium of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center.

Nola recounts the life of the author’s sister, who died at age 25 after several years of treatment for schizophrenia.

Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Hemley has published seven books; his stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and many literary magazines and anthologies. He is the editor of Defunct magazine.

Quvenzhane Wallis

Beasts of the Southern Wild, nominated for four Academy Awards and winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, will be shown from 8 to 11 p.m. Tuesday, April 16, in Scooter’s, located on the first floor of Anderson Student Center.

The film, a drama with fantasy elements, is set in the Louisiana bayou and stars 6-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis. The film will be introduced by Dr. David Penchansky of the St. Thomas Theology Department. More information about the film can be found here.

St. Thomas Alumni Choir, a mixed vocal ensemble of young and old alumni, will present a concert from 3 to 4:30 p.m. Sunday, April 21, in the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas.

The choir is directed by alumni Sean Barker, Josh Bauder and Casey Johnson.

The choir will perform sacred and secular music by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Elizabeth Alexander, Josh Bauder, Jonathan Tschiggfrie, Stephen Paulus, Felix Mendelssohn, Alice Parker, Z. Randall Stroope and Keith Hampton.

The Gabriel Kney organ.

An Organ and Choir Concert, part of a series marking the 25^th anniversary of the dedication of the university’s Gabriel Kney organ, will be held at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 28, in the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas. Host will be Merritt Nequette, retired professor and former chair on the St. Thomas Music Department.

The program will feature the university’s Liturgical Choir and guest alumni singers directed by Aaron Brown and retired Liturgical Choir founder Robert Strusinski; Orchestra directed by Matthew George; and organists James Callahan, David Jenkins, Kevin Seal and Robert Vickery.

They will perform Noel Goemanne’s “Song of Praise” for choir and organ, which was commissioned for the Gabriel Kney organ dedication in 1987; the Franz Schubert Mass in G; the Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani by Francis Poulenc; and the new Concerto for Organ, Strings and Percussion, featuring its composer, organist and professor emeritus of music James Callahan.

Joyce Lyon

The art exhibit “Passaggio/Passage,” featuring works by Joyce Lyon, is on permanent display on the Campus Way, located on the second floor of the Anderson Student Center.

An associate professor of art at the University of Minnesota, Lyon’s works are in public and private collections nationally, including Georgetown University Law Library, the Florida Holocaust Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center and the Weisman Art Museum.

Her work focuses on the intersections of place and memory. “I work from observation with an acute sense of the layering of time,” she said. “In ‘Passagio/Passage,’ I consider pilgrimage as it relates to a physical and spiritual journey and as a meditation on here and there and the passages in between.”

“Passaggio/Passage” by Joyce Lyon

A schedule of this year’s Sacred Arts Festival events can be found here.

Register for the fair by Friday, April 5, at the Career Development Center in Room 123, Murray-Herrick Campus Center.

To attend this event, future teachers must meet Minnesota certification requirements by January 2014. The Career Development Center offers one-to-one appointments and resources to help students prepare for the fair.

For more information visit the Career Development Education Job Fair Web page or call the Career Development Center, (651) 962-6761.

The Asmat are well-known for their sculpture. The challenges of reaching this remote part of southwestern Papua meant Asmat communities had little contact with the outside world until the 1950s. Outsiders have immigrated into the Asmat region for several decades, bringing their cultural beliefs and practices along with them.

Some aspects of Asmat culture have changed dramatically with the introduction of new cultural beliefs as well as imported technology and other mass-produced goods; however, two traditional Asmat art forms that are the focus of the St. Thomas exhibition – carving and storytelling – remain vibrant.

This Asmat carving by Antonius Kamem depicts a man being transported by bats to the ancestral world of Safan. Kamem is from is from the village of Atsj in the Becembub region of Asmat.

The exhibition features carvings by Asmat master carvers, known as the wowipitsj. The works on display were chosen from more than 2,000 carvings and artifacts in the American Museum of Asmat Art collection, one of the most comprehensive of its kind in the United States.

The St. Thomas exhibition was curated by art history graduate student Rachel Simmons.  A board member of the Scott County Historical Society, where she has served as a curatorial intern, Simmons worked as a graduate assistant for the American Museum of Asmat Art for two years and knows the collection well.

“Carving remains a fundamental part of Asmat culture,” Simmons said. “The exhibit explains how their art connects with critical concepts in their culture.”

Dr. Julie Risser, director of the American Museum of Asmat Art, said Asmat culture holds a deep respect for ancestors; Asmat people believe that ancestor spirits embody the world around them and that sacred objects can become a home to these powerful forces.

She explained that this core concept is reflected in both carving and oral traditions. According to one Asmat tradition, a man named Fumeripits found himself alone after experiencing a harrowing journey. To end his loneliness, he carved human figures from wood. The figures lay lifeless around him; however, when he carved a drum and beat out a rhythm on it, spirit entered the forms and the carvings began to move. At first the figures’ movements were jerky but later became graceful.

Beata Atakat, left, a recognized Asmat fiber artist, discusses a weaving project with Dr. Julie Risser, director of the American Museum of Asmat Art. Atakat is from the Asmat village of Atsj.

“An Asmat community could have many carvers,” Risser said, “but the wowipitsj are the masters and the most-respected. For example, if a village is carving a wuramon or “spirit canoe,” each family might have a carver who would create one of the many figures in the canoe; however, the wowipitsj would oversee and guide the project.

“The processes by which large-scale sacred carvings are created and the contexts in which they are used remain a central part of Asmat animistic faith; they strengthen relationships with ancestral spirits,” she said. “Today, many wowipitsj have expanded their carving repertoire and make narrative carvings for an external clientele. This exhibition features those narrative carvings that are inspired by oral traditions.”

The carvings clearly reflect life in the Asmat’s rainforest environment. An estimated 70,000 Asmat live in several hundred villages that are located in tidal and freshwater swamps and lowland rainforest.

The late Michael Rockefeller, who died in 1961 while on an art-collecting expedition, described the Asmat region as “essentially a gigantic mud plain. … Mud is everywhere; even the rivers are gray with it.” Because of frequent flooding, many dwellings are built on posts several feet off the ground or, in some case, in trees. There are few roads but raised boardwalks are common throughout the region.

This carving by Anton Dapo depicts people and animals seeking refuge from a flood by climbing a beringen tree. The artist is from the village of Simsagar in the Safan region of Asmat. St. Thomas photo by Mark Jensen.

Curator Simmons said one of her favorite pieces in the exhibit is a carving by Anton Dapo from the village of Simsagar; created from a single piece of wood, it depicts people and animals climbing a beringen tree to escape a flood.

Risser noted that climate change is of particular concern in the Asmat region because so much of the land is flood-prone swamp. She and other museum staff are looking forward to a planned visit to the “Wowipitsj: Man, Myth, Legend” exhibition on Feb. 20 by internationally known science and climate-change expert Bill McKibben.

He will be at St. Thomas and Macalester College Feb. 20 and 21 for an event titled “In Celebration and Preservation of Winter: Responding to Climate Change in Minnesota and Wisconsin.” Founder of an organization called 350.org, McKibben was called by the Boston Globe “probably the country’s most important environmentalist” and by Time magazine as “the planet’s best green journalist.”

The American Crosier Fathers and Brothers began collecting Asmat art when they first arrived there in the 1950s.

An article on the Crosier website notes that during the order’s early years in Asmat, the Second Vatican Council produced three critical documents: The Church, The Church in the World and the Missionary Church, “which provided inspiration and direction to the Crosier missionaries. These include holding the people’s language and way of life in great esteem, the building of communities of faith endowed with the cultural riches of the people and borrowing from the customs, traditions, wisdom, teaching, arts and sciences of the people.”

“These documents encouraged us to have a holistic approach to the mission,” Crosier Father Ed Greiwe said in the article. “This included a respect for their traditional beliefs, their culture and customs, concern about the education of the people, about their health, about their own local leadership and economic well-being and development.”

By 1973, the Crosiers had collected and preserved more than 1,400 examples of Asmat carvings and artifacts, a challenge in a jungle climate where heat and humidity can destroy wooden and fibrous objects.

Carving of a figure in in a sago tree by Maximus Otor. He lives in the village of Warse in the Simai region of Asmat.

The collection – including finely crocheted masks, stunningly carved shields, long and narrow “spirit canoes” and tall ancestor or bisj poles – was first displayed in the Asmat city of Agats from 1973 to 1975, when it was moved to the Crosier Asmat Museum in Nebraska. The collection moved again in 1995 to the newly established American Museum of Asmat Art in Shoreview where it remained until 2007 when it was donated to St. Thomas by the American Crosier Fathers and Brothers and the Diocese of Agats.

Since then, museum director Risser and the museum’s Acquisitions Committee expanded the collection by more than 500 pieces. Risser purchased some of the works directly from artists during three trips to Asmat.

Many more came from Bishop Alphonse Sowada, a Crossier from the United States who first arrived in Asmat in 1961 and became the first bishop of the Diocese of Agats in 1969. Like many members of the Crossier order who served in Asmat, Sowada held a degree in anthropology and encouraged the Asmat people to preserve their culture through art and the preservation of rituals and feasts.

Two others who added to the collection were Minnesotans Donna and the late Cargill MacMillan Jr.; they traveled to Asmat at least twice where they purchased items at the annual fall “Pesta Budaya Asmat” (Asmat Art Festival).

For the wowipitsj exhibit, curator Simmons selected works from the Crosiers’ original collection as well as newer pieces collected by Risser, Sowada and the MacMillans.

In addition to the museum at St. Thomas, large collections of Asmat art and artifacts can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. In 2009, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts displayed 72 pieces from the St. Thomas collection during a four-month exhibition. Some art historians believe that Asmat art influenced modernist and surrealist Western artists such as Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso.

“Wowipitsj: Man, Myth, Legend” marks the American Museum of Asmat Art’s third exhibition in the Anderson Student Center’s Gallery since the student center opened in January 2012.

The exhibition, free and open to the public, can be seen Feb. 4 to Aug. 4. The Gallery is located on the second floor of the student center at Summit and Cretin avenues.

Exhibition hours are from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Wednesdays, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fridays, and from noon to 4 p.m. on weekends.  More information is available at (651) 962-5512 and the museum’s website.

The American Museum of Asmat Art will host an exhibition reception at 6 p.m. Thursday, March 14, in The Gallery.

The Asmat area is prone to flooding. The solution: Build your home on poles. This 2009 photo was taken in Sawa, Papua, Indonesia, by Dr. Julie Risser during one of her three trips there.

The exhibit, free and open to the public, will be displayed in the lobby gallery of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center. The hours are 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and noon to 9 p.m. on Sunday.

St. Thomas is the sixth stop on the exhibit’s national tour.

“Square Tebachi” by Richard Bresnahan.

A lecture and opening reception will be held at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4, in the O’Shaughnessy Educational Center auditorium and lobby. The speaker will be Dr. Matthew Welch, deputy director and chief curator of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and curator of the “Stoked” ceramics exhibit.

After graduating from St. John’s University in Collegeville in 1976, Bresnahan served as an apprentice for three years under Nakazato Takashi in Karatsu, Japan. His training included everything from menial housekeeping tasks to throwing 500 pieces of pottery in a single day.

Critical to his training was learning about local clays and how to make and apply glazes made from ash and plant materials.  Today, he and his apprentices typically use materials found in the Collegeville area.

Bresnahan returned to St. John’s University in 1979 as its first non-monastic artist in residence and created on campus a pottery studio and wood-fired kiln. Over the years he has experimented with new forms, glazes and techniques, and since the late 1980s, he has taken on about 45 apprentices.

Dr. Mathew Welch, author of “Stoked: Five Artists of Fire and Clay,” and the book’s editor, Sandra Lipschultz.

Welch, the exhibit’s curator, selected works from Bresnahan and representatives from four generations of his apprentices. They are: Kevin Flicker, ceramics instructor at the University of Minnesota-Morris; Stephen Earp, ceramicist and writer from Shelburne Falls, Mass.; Samuel Johnson, ceramics instructor at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University; and Anne Meyer, ceramicist and sculptor from St. Joseph.  While their works reflect different creative approaches, they share a common concern for indigenous materials in relationship to the environment.

“An abiding respect for ecology and natural systems has always characterized Richard Bresnahan’s philosophy and his ongoing dialogue with fire and clay,” wrote Welch. “Throughout his long career, he has consistently challenged himself to undertake new firing techniques, to test potential glaze materials, and to devise unique and elegant functional forms. As a result, the dynamic pottery Bresnahan creates reflects both the specifics of his physical environment – by utilizing local resources – and his own far-reaching artistic vision.”

Each of the four apprentices add their own interpretation to the techniques they learned under Bresnahan. Whether incorporating or building on his philosophy, the apprentices have clearly adopted Bresnahan’s approach.

“ … each maker is ‘stoked’ in the best sense of the word – excited about life and the simple act of using the earth and fire to produce objects of great mystery and strength,” Welch wrote.

“Stoked: Five Artists of Fire and Clay” is paired with a catalog written by Welch. It contains nearly 90 color photographs of the works in the exhibit and biographical reviews of the five artists. The book will be available for purchase and autographing at the opening reception.

The exhibit at St. Thomas is hosted by the university’s Art History Department, part of the College of Arts and Sciences.  The Oct. 4 lecture and reception is co-sponsored by the St. Thomas Alumni Association. Information about the exhibit can be found online or by calling (651) 962-5560.

Those attending the lecture and reception are asked to pre-register at this website.