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.

In the HMML Art Collection, 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.

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