SBU Prof's Artwork on Display in Japan

Painter and printmaker Constance Pierce, associate professor of visual arts at St. Bonaventure University, is one of 12 artists internationally to be invited to participate in “The Fifth Art on Paper” exhibition now under way at the Museum of Art in Toyota City, Nagoya, Japan.

For Pierce, among the artists invited by guest curator Ryozo Morishito, it marks her second appearance in the exhibition in as many years. She participated in “The Fourth Art on Paper” exhibition in 2010.

Pierce is exhibiting a new series of allegorical figurative watercolors titled “The Dance: Epiphany and Loss.” The images in this series are meant to bear witness to the joys and sufferings of the human soul.

“My intent was to communicate the radiant energy and spirituality expressed by the human form in the epiphany of dance, as well as in the torment of suffering,” said Pierce. “The intense emotions of life’s darkness and light are synthesized and transfigured in the ritual of dance and I wanted my figures to embody this dichotomy. I engage these images for the revelations they may offer to the human psyche.”

The hosting museum decided to hold the exhibition in spite of the recent natural and nuclear disasters that continue to devastate Japan. “Though my watercolors were created before the recent tragedies in Japan, I wish to dedicate my series to the anguish, grace, and endurance now illuminated in the people of Japan,” said Pierce.

Pierce graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art where she was awarded the Helen Green Perry Prize for European Travel and Study. She received her advanced degree from the Hoffberger School of Painting of the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore.

Her sketchbooks have been featured in two exhibitions at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Her monotypes and sketchbooks are in the museum’s permanent collection as well as the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Rare Books Library of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Georgetown University Special Collections, the International Marion Research Institute of the University of Dayton (Ohio), and the Yale Center for British Art: Prints and Drawings sketchbook archives in Washington.

Pierce is also presently exhibiting her artwork in St. Bonaventure’s Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts. That exhibition, titled “KYRIE: World Cry,” encompasses several series including watercolors, paintings and drawings, as well as newly published giclee prints produced for Pierce by Martin Studios in Olean.

The Quick Center will host a closing reception for the artist from 4 to 5 p.m. on Friday, April 1, at which 17 St. Bonaventure painting students who are studying with Pierce will present a communal artwork titled “Earth Song.” The event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Quick Center at 716-375-2494.