Pierce Exhibition at SBU's Quick Center

A solo exhibition by Constance Pierce, associate professor of drawing and painting at St. Bonaventure University, has opened at the university’s Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts.

The exhibition, titled “Kyrie: World Cry,” is in the Front Gallery of the Quick Center and runs through March.

Pierce is drawn toward the archetypal aspects of the Judeo Christian religious experience, but creates a more contemporary expression of these themes. She often works with scriptural images of lamentation, absolution and transcendence, and fleshes out parable to reveal the relevance of these ancient stories to today’s world of dissonance and division. Pierce confronts these images in all of their darkness and light, and embraces them for the revelations they provide the human soul.

Several drawings in this exhibition are visual meditations on the haunting and disturbing consequences of war. These and other images prompt questions on issues of faith, tolerance and ethics. Another series, executed in watercolor, expresses the epiphany of the soul through the metaphor of dance.

In addition, the artist is exhibiting a group of Gilcee prints published in this format for the first time. The series, “Will You Be There?,” was previously shown at the Museum of Art, Toyota City, in Aichi, Japan, in an exhibition titled “Art on Paper: 2010.”

The works were originally inspired by the spoken epilogue of a musical composition by the late composer and humanitarian Michael Joseph Jackson. The artist said his words "give voice to the loneliness of post-modern man and are a call to each of us to become healers of our world."

Pierce is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art, where she received the Helen Green Perry Award for European Travel. She received her advanced degree from the Hoffberger School of Painting of the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where she studied with renowned abstract-expressionist painter Grace Hartigan.

Pierce has exhibited regionally, nationally, in Europe and Japan. Her sketchbooks were featured in two exhibitions at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Her monotypes and sketchbooks are in the permanent collection there, and can also be found in the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington; the rare books collection of the National Gallery of Art Library in Washington; the Georgetown University Special Collections; the International Marion Research Institute of Dayton University, Dayton, Ohio; and the sketchbook archives at the Yale Center for British Art: Prints and Drawings, New Haven, Conn.

Her work has been featured throughout the years in articles and reviews in the Washington Post, Chicago’s New Art Examiner, the Sunday New York Times, the New Haven Register, the Yale Bulletin, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and in the literary journal IMAGE: Art, Faith and Mystery.

An article that Pierce authored, titled “Opus Cordis: Reflections of a Contemporary Artist Embracing the Drama of Religious Imagery,” is included in a new book, “Art Inspiring Transmutations of Life,” Volume 106 of the “Analecta Husserliana” series, published in 2010.

The Quick Center will host a closing reception for Pierce from 4 to 5 p.m. on Friday, April 1.

The Quick Center for the Arts is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.