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March 22, 2019, Detroit, Michigan – Years from now, visitors to the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) will view a series of nine paintings by Sister Barbara Cervenka, OP, and will learn of the peaceful, quiet, devoted life and the violent death of her cousin, Ursuline Sister Joanne Marie Mascha. Sister Barbara has donated the series to the DIA’s permanent collection.
“The series won’t be on permanent exhibit, but it’ll probably be shown from time to time,” Sister Barbara said. “When they do an exhibit of works on Michigan artists or work of a certain theme, then it’s very likely that the series would be put in the show.”
Sister Barbara approached Nancy Barr, one of the curators, last fall to offer the series for the permanent collection. The offer had to be discussed by a number of committees. The decision is made on a “case-by-case basis,” Sister Barbara explained. “My work wouldn’t be that well known, so [the decision] was based on the fact that the painting series was of a quality that they would want to accept it. It’s a very big compliment.”
But Sister Barbara is happy about the decision for a reason greater than the compliment to her artistic talent. “I’m so happy that they were accepted because it means that the paintings have a future – they’ll be seen by a larger audience, and Joanne’s life and death will continue to be remembered.”
Sister Barbara began painting the series in 1995, on the day of her cousin’s funeral. “I came down to the basement and started painting these little pieces, all within a short period of time.” The paintings depict the woods, the “trees that had welcomed her, that were the only witnesses to her death,” Sister Barbara wrote in an article about the death of her cousin. “The paintings were small gestures, like the lighting of a candle at a graveside, of bringing flowers to a wake. They were a gesture of paying attention.”
A few years older than Sister Barbara, Sister Joanne had been a member of the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland for 40 years when she was killed. “She was a very nice person, a very kind, guileless person” who was involved in liturgical dance and in the peace movement. Sister Barbara last saw her cousin six months earlier, at the funeral of Sister Barbara’s sister, Anita.
Sister Joanne taught in elementary schools in Cleveland and spent the last 15 years of her life at her congregation’s Motherhouse, “working at the college library, performing pastoral work in neighboring parishes, and coordinating the Motherhouse switchboard,” Sister Barbara wrote. “She loved nature, went bird watching, and was trusting and talked easily to people.”
On the day of her death, March 27, 1995, Sister Joanne signed out at the Motherhouse switchboard and took a walk in the nearby woods. There, she encountered Daniel Pitcher, 21, who did odd jobs for neighbors and who was stalking birds with a bow and arrow. “Joanne never came back, never returned,” Sister Barbara wrote in the article. “She was left strangled, raped; she was left dead or dying.”
When Sisters at the Motherhouse realized the next day that she was missing, they called the police. She was found in the woods, 24 hours after her death. “The hardest part was imagining: the unwitnessed death with its fear, its terror, the violation of a trusting spirit,” Sister Barbara wrote. “Joanne was alone, for whatever length of time, she was alone, and this was a deep sadness.”
Sister Barbara noted the irony that Sister Joanne died violently 15 years after and half a world away from another Ursuline Sister of Cleveland: Sister Dorothy Kazel, one of four U.S. Church women raped and murdered by the military in El Salvador on December 2, 1980.
Like Sister Dorothy, Sister Joanne has been a reminder to the Ursuline Sisters of Cleveland of the many women who die violently. “When the Ursuline Sisters commemorate the anniversary of Joanne’s death, they use it as a way to remember all women who died violently or suffered violence,” Sister Barbara said.
The Ursuline Sisters continue their witness for peace by insisting that Daniel Pitcher, found guilty of murdering Sister Joanne, should not receive the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Sister Barbara hopes her series of paintings will also be a witness, years into the future, of Sister Joanne and her commitment to peace. The paintings “are a commemoration,” she said. “When you do something like this, it’s so people don’t forget. … This is also a way to commemorate all women whose lives are torn apart by violence.”
May 24, 2018, Hinckley, Ohio – A township in north-central Ohio seems a long way from Mosul, Iraq, or from the refugee camps in northern Iraq. But these distant areas were recently connected by a Japanese girl who folded paper cranes, a Dominican artist and art teacher who painted paper cranes, an elementary school art teacher, and a class of compassionate and innovative fifth-grade students.
This connection can now be seen in three small paintings of folded paper cranes displayed in the library of Hinckley Elementary School in Hinckley, Ohio. The cranes were brought to the school through the innovation of a fifth-grade art class that raised more than their goal of 1,000 quarters – a total of nearly $364 – from their classmates as a donation to support the work of the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Mosul, Iraq.
Katie Hatch Massaro, the art teacher at Hinckley Elementary School in Hinckley, Ohio, has for 10 years been teaching her students the story of 1,000 paper cranes folded by Sadako Saski, a 12-year-old Japanese girl who was exposed to the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and died of leukemia 10 years later. The heart-wrenching story of this young girl inspired Sister Barbara Cervenka, OP, to create 1,000 small paintings of paper cranes, which can be adopted for a donation of $100. The donations have helped the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena who fled Mosul with hundreds of thousands of their neighbors on August 6, 2014, with the arrival of ISIS warriors. During their time in a refugee camp in northern Iraq, the Sisters opened schools and clinics to serve the needs of their fellow refugees.
Many of the Sisters and other refugees have since returned to their homes after ISIS was expelled, but now face the challenges of rebuilding their homes and churches that were destroyed.
“I’ve been teaching about paper cranes for 10 years,” said Katie, a student of Sister Barbara’s and a 2007 graduate of Siena Heights University. She teaches her fifth-grade classes the story of Sadako and how to fold the paper cranes. In recent years, she has followed this lesson up with the story of Sister Barbara’s project. “We talked about what it meant to be a refugee,” she said. They understood that the Sisters and neighbors were forced out of their homes, and that the donations would help the people.
Katie didn’t initiate the idea of the class making a donation for a crane in support of the refugees. “I wanted the kids to be self-motivated” and to come up with the idea on their own, she said.
Her wait came to an end this semester when a student suggested making a donation for one of the paintings, Katie recalled. Students discussed the idea during lunch and a small group approached her. “I worked with them through the whole process,” she said, by encouraging them to find a way that they could raise the money on their own. Students decided to collect 1,000 quarters from among their fifth-grade classmates.
“The kids assigned jobs to everyone in the class and even built their own website,” Katie recalled. They created a presentation for the principal, James Carpenter, and the Parent-Teacher Organization to secure permission and garner support for the project. Just two weeks after they presented the project to their classmates, they had exceeded their goal. Because they wanted to add framing to their order, they intended to order two cranes, but the PTO suggested they order three – and offered to supplement the money that the students had raised.
The process did not end there, Katie added. The class took a vote to choose the cranes paintings they wanted, choosing green cranes to match the school’s color.
The students later reflected on the impact that the project had on them. “It was tough and challenging, but it was worth it,” one student said. Others spoke of the impact they hoped the project will have on the Sisters in Iraq and the people they serve. “It was a good opportunity to help people and inspire other students once we’ve left Hinckley Elementary School,” one student said. Another made the connection to the story of the 1,000 cranes folded in Japan and to Sister Barbara. “The inspiration chain goes from Sadako to her classmates to the 1,000 Crane Project for Iraq to us at Hinckley Elementary,” the student said. “We hope it keeps going!”
Katie is very proud of her fifth-grade class, which will graduate at the end of May from Hinckley Elementary School and move on to middle school. “I’ve always seen leadership and initiative in a lot of them,” she said. “It was a privilege to be able to walk them through this process and watch them stretch their wings for the first time.” Noting that she had taught art to that class since they were in kindergarten, she added, “It’s an honor to see them come as kindergartners and leave so grown up, young teenagers.”
Katie hopes all of her students benefit from their study of art. “I want them to leave me knowing that art can make a difference, that art is part of our culture. It’s part of our identity,” she said. “I want them to have an appreciation for art.”
Fifth-grade students from Hinckley Elementary School, Hinckley, Ohio, pose with the three cranes that they ordered with their donation to the 1,000 Cranes for Iraq Project. Photo Courtesy of Hinckley Elementary School