MUSEUMS of contemporary art can stand a little change.
Visitors might be surprised to find some changes at the Sacred Heart Parish Garage Art Studio, the home of alternative and contemporary. The museum has been transformed after renovations were made recently.
The walls are now in total black. Finally what I see is what I have been wanting to find in an art gallery. This is how such a place should look instead of the usual clinical white and gray.
Of course, this is only my opinion, and you can have your own “dream gallery look.”
The improvements made were in preparation for a commemorative show marking the quadri-centennial death anniversary of Matteo Ricci (1552 Macerata, Italy, 1610), a Jesuit priest who pioneered missionary work in China.
Ricci sailed to China in a time when Europe was blooming through Renaissance art and science. The age of discovery wasn’t over yet, or perhaps it was just beginning. Ricci was very much a Renaissance man.
In China, he published the first-ever map of the world—in Chinese! He collaborated with another priest to produce the first writing of the Cathechism in the Chinese language.
Missionary life in China was an adventure of another sort.
Priests faced expulsion, attack, and arrest. Ricci experienced imprisonment in a fortress in Tianjin. His other publications were Treatise On Friendship, Summary of the Christian Doctrines and Twenty-five Moral Sentences.
While feeling life coming to a close, Ricci edited the “Story of the Entry of the Society of Jesus and Christianity into China.”
Ricci died after a brief illness and unprecedented in those days, the Emperor of China granted him a plot of land for his tomb. Something never before happened in Chinese history. Catch the exhibit depicting this milestone. It will run until Aug. 30.