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Dominicans and Disease Exhibit

McGreal Center Exhibits

Dominicans and Disease: Covid-19 Arrives in New York
Dominicans and Disease

Curated by Christopher Allison and Katelyn Kuchler

Dominicans were dogged by disease, but they dove into high-risk communities to combat it. Sometimes it broke them. Sometimes it killed them. Sometimes they were the only ones serving communities on the edge of survival. This exhibition looks at how the Dominican family has faced disease in the American past and their modern efforts in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dominicans and Disease is available in person at Dominican University, at other Dominican institutions across the country, and online.

Featured Dominican Congregation Exhibits

Covid-19 Year in Review exhibit
Covid-19 in Review

This exhibit highlights how the Dominican Sisters of Hope (Ossining, NY) faced the challenges of Covid 19 from Spring 2020 through Spring 2021. Visit the exhibit

Journey to Springfield Springfield Dominicans exhibit
The Journey to Springfield: The Origins of the Dominican Sisters of Springfield, Illinois, 1873-1893

This StoryMap project is dedicated to the first twenty years of the Dominican Sisters of Springfield, llinois, which is entitled “The Journey to Springfield.” It tells the story of the congregation’s foundresses and the path that led them from St. Catharine, KY to Jacksonville, IL to Springfield. The exhibit utilizes two key historical texts and the first recorded annals to tell the story, as well as photographs, correspondence (original and typescript), poetry, maps, newspaper clippings, and other images for its visual display. View the exhibit

Somewhere in the West Grand Rapids Dominicans StoryMap Exhibit
Somewhere in the West: The Historical Geography of the Grand Rapids Dominican Sisters

The Archives of the Dominican Sisters of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is excited to share our Story Map entitled “Somewhere in the West: The Historical Geography of the Grand Rapids Dominican Sisters” (https://arcg.is/1PHjjq) focusing on our Michigan pioneer predecessors, which began as a collaborative project between our archivists and a geospatial analysis class led by Dr. Mary Clinthorne at Aquinas College.

Incorporating early photographs with information from historic annals and other primary sources (including the diary of a Sister born in Quebec a year after the American Civil War ended), our Story Map depicts how our predecessors first came to Michigan.  These true pioneers forsook basic human comforts and set out in boats and buggies into the largely unsettled woods of the lower peninsula to be of service to the children and families in these new parishes.  The work was hard and the conditions so poor that Sisters literally risked their health and even their lives on these missions.  In doing so, they fulfilled the dying vision of Mother Augustine Neuhierl who saw a vast field somewhere in the West dotted white with Dominican habits.