By Heather Monahan
Assistant Features Editor
Next Friday, the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts is giving students and community members the opportunity to see one of the most recognizable holiday scenes through the eyes of hundreds of different artists.
The Quick Center will be hosting a crèche, or nativity scene, walk displaying the various nativity scenes they’ve collected over the past eight years. The tour will begin in the Quick Center at 3 p.m. and continue to Francis Chapel and University Ministries. At each location, Father Francis J. Di Spigno, O.F.M., or Sister Margaret Carney, O.S.F., university president, will be present to help those on the tour reflect while they observe the nativity scenes. Bonaventure students will also be present to provide musical entertainment throughout the tour. The tour will end at the Quick Center at 5 p.m., where hot cocoa and cider will be offered to those who participated.
While the university has been displaying nativity scenes for years, Evelyn J. Penman, assistant director of the Quick Center, said this is the first year they’ve displayed the scenes in different places on campus and held a tour to see them.
“We were just trying to come up with a different way for people to see them,” Penman said.
Sean Conklin, assistant curator at the Quick Center, thought of the idea for the campus tour as a way to move the crèches around rather than having them all together in a gallery like in previous years.
Penman said 50 of the crèches from Bonaventure’s collection were sent to Alvernia University, a Franciscan university in Reading, Pa. for an exhibit.
The collection was started by James Shine, an alumnus who donated a collection to the university. Since then, alumni and members of the community have been donating crèches to the collection or bringing them back to the university after a vacation. Penman said the collection even has a crèche from Japan.
Conklin said there is a crèche for everyone, with many different setups and themes that different people could find appealing. The collection includes an origami crèche, a Fisher Price crèche and an anime crèche, just to name a few.
