Art & Photographs

The Art & Photographs collection, located at HMML, includes prints, drawings, icons, ceramics, and archaeological objects dating from the ancient world through the 20th century, as well as photographs and slides from the late 20th century.

Much of the collection was a gift to Saint John’s University by the liturgical artist Frank Kacmarcik, Obl.OSB, (1920–2004) who spent a lifetime gathering materials into an “Arca Artium” or “Ark of the Arts” to inspire his work. Areas of focus in the Arca Artium collection include the graphic arts, liturgical art, monasticism in art, and printing—totaling more than 6,000 original works, primarily woodcuts, engravings, etchings, and lithographs.

Artwork owned by HMML (the HMML Art Collection) spans various mediums including drawings, ceramics, etchings, engravings, icons, lithographs, photographs, serigraphs, and woodcuts. Photographic works include the Robert A. Hadley Slide Collection of archaeological sites across the Middle East and the Columba Stewart Photographs collection of monastic sites. Arca Artium also holds important American photography by Edward Weston (1886–1958), a master of 20th-century photography.

Cataloging of the collection is ongoing. Please contact HMML if you would like to know more about collection items that are not yet available online in HMML Museum.

View Collections

Highlights

Etchings by the important Italian printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi, like this View of St. Peter's Square, from the series Vedute di Roma (AAP5185)
Prints focused on monasticism, such as the hermitary print series, by Dutch printmaker Marten de Vos, produced between 1585 and 1600, depicting male and female religious recluses
Bronze Age pottery from the Bāb edh-Dhrā site in Jordan’s Dead Sea Plain, are the earliest items and come from the Alberic Culhane OSB Collection
19th-century Japanese woodblock prints
Modern prints, like George Rouault’s 1920s masterpiece series Miserere et Guerre (AAP2343) and Mexican modernist Rufino Tamayo’s print, Woman at the Window, from the Mujeres suite (AAP0129)
The Edmund Gronkiewicz collection of Russian icons, dating from mostly from the 18th century to 19th century

Date Range

3300 BCE–20th century CE
Contact

Katherine Goertz, Curator/Registrar, Art Collections
Visit

To schedule a visit with Art & Photograph collection items, email: hmml@hmml.org

Art & Photographs Stories

Creepy Crawlies and Little Beasts

Monuments to the Dead

Grief on the Page

The Calligrapher Clément Perret

Woodcut Fragments of the 16th Century

See more

The extensive print collection includes works from Marten de Vos, Piranesi, Dürer, and others. (Dürer, St. John before God and the Elders, AAP3603)

Island Hay, a 1945 lithograph by major American Regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton. (AAP0998)

The collection includes works by 20th-c. Jewish artists Leonard Baskin, Ben-Zion, Ben Shahn, Marc Chagall, and others, including this 1956 Chagall lithograph. (AAP3299)

The Robert A. Hadley Slide Collection includes hundreds of images from architectural and archaeological sites across the Middle and Near East, including this image from Al-Bārah, Syria. (HSC00193)