Opening Lecture: "Body to Soul"

Join us in the Diffley Board Room for an opening night lecture to celebrate the opening of Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul, on view in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries from January 27 – April 6, 2023. Curator Sarah Parrish, PhD, Assistant Professor of Art History, Plymouth State University, will introduce the exhibition. A reception with light refreshments will follow at 6 p.m. in the Great Hall and the Bellarmine Hall Galleries will be open 6-8 p.m.

We invite you to join the conversation via the following options:

• In-person in the Diffley Board Room (1st floor of Bellarmine Hall)
• Streaming via https://bit.ly/BodytoSoul

About the exhibition:

Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul is a solo exhibition surveying the artist’s four-decade engagement with the physical and symbolic properties of thread. Minkowitz reinvents traditional needlework by crocheting fantastical forms, coating them in resin and shellac to create rigid sculptures and hangings. The delicate, mesh-like surfaces of her artworks break down oppositions between soft and hard, inside and outside, body and soul.

The poetic title Body to Soul is borrowed from just one of the sculptures that will be on view, but it is a broader theme that reverberates across the exhibition’s selection of over thirty vessels, sculptures, wall hangings, wearables, and works on paper – including never-before-seen examples coming from the artist’s studio.

Norma Minkowitz lives and works in Connecticut. Her work is represented in private and public collections across the United States and internationally. She is unique among fiber artists creating hard sculptures from soft materials, and for using thread to invoke universal themes of mortality, memory, nature, and writing. The exhibition is guest curated by Sarah Parrish PhD., Assistant Professor of Art History at Plymouth State University, New Hampshire.

https://www.fairfield.edu/museum/norma-minkowitz/

Image: Norma Minkowitz, Body to Soul, 2003, Fiber, metal, resin, paint, mirror, crocheted. Museum of Arts and Design, New York; purchased with funds by the Windgate Charitable Foundation, 2004. Photography © Tom Grotta, Courtesy browngrotta arts