Images Linger

Rachel Morris (center) with Maggie Kocevar’s sisters Julie Devries (left) and Sarah Strang (right) at the opening of Images of Love and War

A promotional photo from the 1998 premier of The Interview, by award winning playwright Faye Sholiton whiched premiered at Notre Dame

An image can burn into your conscience in a way that words cannot.

According to Rachel Morris, associate professor of fine arts at Notre Dame College, this is one reason why the Tolerance Resource Center has sponsored numerous programs centered on the arts since its opening in 1997. “When we started the Center, we knew our programs needed to be diverse. You can’t continually do lectures or speaker series to get the message of tolerance across.”

“The arts reach people in a visceral way,” said Morris.“Images linger.”

The Center has included a variety of visual and theatrical arts exhibits by playwrights such as Faye Sholiton and Eva Schloss; painters Peter London and Mary Costanza; and photographers such as Elliot Faye.

It is the immediacy that makes the arts a powerful medium for the messages of the Tolerance Resource Center. “The visual arts are a primary form of communication,” said Morris. “To look at an image and understand it may take you 30 seconds. You can convey the horror of the Holocaust or a message about how to live peacefully in one image rather than in an entire volume of text."

A promotional photo from the 2001 performance of Paths of Resistance by the Manchester Dance Ensemble (photo courtesy of Gary Harwood)

A patron takes in Mary Costanza’s exhibit Kaddish for Six Million	...And Then They Came for Me, a play by James Still based on incidents in the life of Eva Geiringer Schloss, a neighbor and contemporary of Anne Frank, appeared at Notre Dame in 2006
A handcrafted quilt by Native American artists Nancy Dumas, Freda Morris and Marjorie Villafane	Final Portrait, an exhibit by artist Peter London, appeared in conjunction with the premier of The Interview
Mother and Child, a piece from the 2001 exhibition of Images of Love and War by Mary Costanza (photo courtesy of John Costanza)	An image the 2006 exhibit Coreopsis: Renderings of Children in the Holocaust by Barbara Powers

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