Another American Adventure: art

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Sunday, August 8, 2010

St. Bonaventure University - The Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts

What I did find open on the St. Bonaventure campus was The Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts. Well, at least the door was open, no one was there but me.

What a treat! Again, the art felt very Franciscan to me. I love this rendition of Francis:

and another painting along the same lines ...

There were mosaics ...

and fun stuff ...

Upstairs I found a photo exhibit of the Allegheny River, which starts as a trickle in northwestern PA and then flows into New York State for a bit before heading down to Pittsburgh and joining the Monongahela to form the Ohio River.

This was on an outside wall of the Center for the Arts.

"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.