The Alva de Mars Megan Chapel Art Center is Saint Anselm College's gallery for the exhibition of fine art.
Founded in 1967, this facility provides a gracious setting for special exhibitions and houses a permanent collection of artworks. It welcomes the campus and general public with exhibitions throughout the academic year.
Contact
Email:ChapelArtCenter@anselm.edu
Phone: 603-641-7470
Location: Alumni Hall, first floor
Office Hours: Mon.–Fri.: 8:30 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
Gallery Hours (when an exhibit is open)
Tue.–Fri.: 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
Thu. evenings: 4:00–7:00 p.m.
About the Chapel Art Center
The Alva de Mars Megan Chapel Art Center is Saint Anselm College's gallery for the exhibition of fine art. Founded in 1967, this facility provides a gracious setting for special exhibitions and houses a permanent collection of artworks. It welcomes the campus and general public with exhibitions throughout the academic year.
Formerly the college's chapel, the Chapel Art Center maintains a beautifully decorated vaulted ceiling with allegorical lunettes painted by Father Raphael Pfisterer, O.S.B. (1877-1942) and magnificent stained glass windows. Its uniquely serene ambiance and rich historical significance make for the perfect cultural setting. As a center for the promotion of the fine arts, exhibitions coincide with lectures, tours, concerts, and recitals.
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Exhibitions
Current Exhibition
Passion for Progress: Serigraph Prints by Corita Kent
Selections from the Permanent Collection
September 25 - December 5, 2025
Passion for Progress is an exhibition title signaling not only the character and motivation of Corita Kent’s work, but also the evolution of the Chapel Art Center’s own collection. The initial gift of nine works from the Gloria Ann Holmes estate initiated new dimensions of donor relationship, collection development, and aesthetic interest for the Chapel Art Center. Kent’s religiously themed messages were added to the then newly established MacDonald Collection for religious works, as her entirely poetic approach blended Gospel values with modern-day revolutionary social change. Her work bolstered the power and value of screen prints and accessible art for our collection. You will note a group of other prints and posters exhibited here, meant to provide further witness to the handy graphic effectiveness of the screen print.
Kent’s contemporary “Pop” style and motivation emerged from within her very own life as a sister of the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in California, and folded into the revolutionary period of the 1960s, the peace movement, alongside tremendous social change and contradiction in both the secular world and her religious life in the Catholic Church.
An exhibition at the Fogg Museum at Harvard University in 2015-16 was a retrospective look at her amazing contribution to the art world. At the time, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, called Corita Kent “an artist and a visionary—a doctor of our church as it sees and imagines.” * Her colors, shapes, and collective recitations were meant to inspire. Her resistance to what was ugly and unjust captured the essence of the revivalist spirit, engendering a bold simplicity and transparent truthfulness that was new for the time.
We are very grateful for these works, as they tell of an enduring freedom belonging to the medium and its adaptability to blended worlds of culture. What was “Pop” was also drawing from an entire history of faith, philosophy, poetry, and political regeneration. We look to art to remind, and to renew.
We are profoundly grateful to Dr. May Futrell for her generosity and care over the years. Her stewardship of her sister Dr. Gloria Ann Holmes’ estate, as well as her own thoughtful beneficence, has made, and will make, a tremendous difference to our collection for years to come!
*cswr.hds.harvard.edu