Blanche Marie Gallagher
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Blanche Marie Gallagher BVM | |
|---|---|
| Personal life | |
| Born | August 28, 1922 |
| Died | November 19, 2010 (aged 88) |
| Religious life | |
| Religion | Roman Catholicism |
Blanche Marie Gallagher (1922–2010) was an American Roman Catholic nun, painter, and art professor. She was notable for her paintings influenced by the writings of French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and she was profiled by the academic journal The Teilhard Review in 1976. Her papers are at Loyola University Chicago, and at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art.[1] She was chair of the art department at Mundelein College in Chicago.[2]
She was born Patricia Jane Gallagher on August 28, 1922 in Waverly, Iowa, to Blanche Jacobson Gallagher and John Joseph Gallagher Sr.[3][4] She spent two years at Clarke College (now university) in Dubuque, Iowa, as an interior design major, but reported dissatisfaction with uniforms and a rural campus.[5] She transferred to Mundelein College in Chicago, now part of Loyola University Chicago [6], majoring in art with a philosophy minor, and graduating in 1944. She supplemented her coursework with classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she said she was able to study life drawing with nude models, something not possible on her private Catholic campus.[5] On the night of February 2, 1943, she reported a mystic experience:
...I awakened to a Presence. I knew that | was invited to an espousal relationship with this Presence. I just knew; I didn’t know how | knew. It was a voice, a knowing, nothing that I could doubt. I suggested to that voice that it had come to the wrong bed, for my roommate... often said the rosary at night, kneeling by the side of her bed. I was not at all 'holy,' and I surely had other plans. This experience absolutely was not The Dream [of marriage and children], and it couldn’t have come at a more bewildering time.[5]
She entered the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary the same year, accepting a name change to sister Mary Blanche Marie.[7] The name happened to include her mother's (she wrote that she did not choose it), and her mother, not Catholic, took consolation in it. Gallagher said she found the two versions of Mary repetitive, and thus did not use the first one.[5] She received an MFA from Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, in 1956.[2] She also studied at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, Italy.