A Degas etching of a ballet dancer hangs near a 20th-century kinetic sculpture. One wall holds a life-size aerial photograph of the Tour de France. Elsewhere in the 5,000 square feet of temporary gallery space are works by Indigenous American artists, European masters and contemporary photographers.
The Raclin Murphy Museum of Art is celebrating the 150th anniversary of Notre Dame’s art collection with a temporary exhibition, “Bridging Time and Place,” on display through June 14.
The exhibition displays 107 of the museum’s most recently acquired works of art, including paintings, prints, textiles, photographs and sculptures. All the items were gifts from donors to mark the collection’s sesquicentennial.
Notre Dame started its art collection in 1875 with the creation in the Main Building of Bishops’ Memorial Hall, an eclectic assembly of portraits, sculpture and other artifacts of American Catholic history. Much of the collection — and that Main Building — was lost in a major fire just four years later, but the building was quickly rebuilt, and the art collection continued to grow, thanks to the contributions of Italian artist Luigi Gregori and others. The expanding collection later moved to other locations on campus, including the former Snite Museum of Art attached to O’Shaughnessy Hall, before moving to the Raclin Murphy in 2023.
Museum Director Joseph Becherer, the exhibition’s lead curator, describes it as “a sampling of the very best” of the anniversary acquisitions and a celebration of the long-standing importance of the visual arts at Notre Dame. He attributes the University’s esteem for visual art to its liberal arts background and its European roots, as well as the strong historical relationship between art and the Catholic Church.
In 2022, the museum set a goal of 150 new acquisitions to mark the sesquicentennial. It received 168 gifts, some of which were entire collections — adding in total more than 1,300 individual works to the museum’s holdings.
Many pieces fall within the museum’s six current collecting priorities: European and American art before 1900; works on paper; Indigenous art; sculpture; modern and contemporary art; and Irish art.
“Bridging Time and Place” ventures beyond these categories, representing the varied tastes of donors. Works range from an 1895 painting of Notre-Dame de Paris by post-Impressionist artist Hippolyte Petitjean to oils by contemporary Nigerian artist Barry Yusufu; a large selection of mid-19th-century American lithographs by artists such as Henry C. Eno and Nathan B. Abbott; and a tattooed powwow drum by contemporary artist David Martin of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi.
Becherer hopes seeing the items will be a moving experience for visitors from campus and the wider community. “Art may be an inanimate object, but it’s something that triggers lots of human emotion,” he says. “So even though [artworks] might sit very quietly there on the wall, there’s a lot that’s going on in the hearts and brains and souls of the people that stand in front of them.”
Brigid Iannelli, a sophomore American studies major with minors in journalism and education, is this magazine’s spring intern.