From January through June of 2027, the Notre Dame Arts Initiative will host the inaugural Notre Dame Arts Biennial, an art festival featuring over 100 predominantly free public events, including lectures, exhibitions, performances, and workshops. Programming will occur primarily on campus and in the larger South Bend community, as well as at a handful of select international locations.
The Notre Dame Arts Initiative was established in 2024, with the goal of collaboratively integrating research, teaching, and exhibition of the arts, as well as providing the Notre Dame and South Bend community with meaningful, intellectual artistic experiences. Stemming from this initial enterprise is the new biennial, spearheaded by Initiative Director and Professor of Art History Michael Schreffler, Managing Director Rebecca Struch, and Program Manager Laura Winkle.
According to their website, the biennial is “rooted in the belief that the arts are essential to communal flourishing.”
The biennial’s website continues, “[P]rogramming in visual, spatial, literary, and performing arts strengthens regional and global partnerships, facilitates symbiotic exchange through sustained community-campus interactions, and provides new platforms for arts research to positively impact the public.”
Furthermore, the biennial aspires to embody creative communication in partnership with Notre Dame’s Catholic identity. In an interview with Notre Dame News, university president Father Robert Dowd, C.S.C., stated that “the Arts Biennial exemplifies how the [u]niversity’s commitment to the arts advances our Catholic mission by using creative expression to foster meaningful cultural exchanges and contribute to a thriving shared home.”
Catholic-centered artistry is the focus of multiple aspects of biennial programming. “Of Heaven and Earth: Ukrainian Sacred Art and the Good Life” is an exhibit by the Nanovic Institute in partnership with the Ukrainian Catholic University, and features contemporary Ukrainian iconography and sacred art.
Additionally, theology and the arts merge in “The Work of Human Hands: Liturgy and the Senses.” This three day conference convenes scholars in disciplines such as theology, history, music, anthropology, and philosophy to explore “ways in which Christian and Jewish worship forms, employs, invokes, evokes, and plays on human sense perception—sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, kinesthetics and proprioception, as well as the imaginative faculties.” Running from April 15 through April 17, the conference will conclude with the performance of a sung Vespers composed by Dr. J.J. Wright, Notre Dame professor and director emeritus of the Notre Dame Folk Choir.
The theme of the inaugural biennial is inspired by symbiosis, the scientific term for an enduring relationship between organisms. Through this theme, the biennial “calls upon individual talents to strengthen community through collaborative planning, convenes audiences and participants through collective arts experiences, and encourages global connections through cultural exchange.”
A variety of events spanning from exhibitions and performances at the Raclin-Murphy Museum of Art and the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, to visual displays at the Eddy Street commons, to an artist exchange program between Dublin, Mexico City, and South Bend is scheduled.
Highlights of the biennial include a fireside chat with Maya Lin, designer of the Washington, D.C Vietnam Veterans Memorial, performances by the National Symphony Orchestra, South Bend theatre companies, Notre Dame students, and the “More Than: Artists in Collaboration for a Greater Good” exhibit at the Raclin.
The “More Than” exhibition, which will open on January 31, is a core facet of the biennial’s programming. Created through collaboration with other artists, or in communion with larger issues, the artwork is meant to “illuminate critical issues of cultural change, spiritual and historical journeys, social inequalities and opportunities, and environmental fragility, among other issues.”
In collaboration with Notre Dame’s international partners, the biennial will also showcase art forms from across the globe. Notably, the English-language premiere of visiting Chinese theatre director Wang Chong’s piece Lying Flat 2.0, as well as the United States debut of the influential Peruvian dance group Qhapaq Qolla, will take the stage.
Although the biennial will not formally begin until January, the full list of programming and further details can be found on their website.
Madeline Page is a junior studying biology. She is currently enrolled in a course dedicated to a tenet of symbiosis: parasitism. She is unsure why God made so many diabolical little creatures, but is trying to trust that they, too, serve a purpose. Send answers to mpgae4@nd.edu.