WILMINGTON — Wilmington College is hosting a new exhibit, “Gifts of Peace: Historical Artifacts as Reconciliation and Healing,” premiering with a mid-March opening reception at the Meriam R. Hare Quaker Heritage Center.
The QHC display will run from March 16 through July 24 with normal gallery hours weekdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
An opening reception and program will be held March 16, from 6 to 8:30 p.m., with Hirokazu Miyazaki presenting the lecture, “The Gift of Peace,” at 7 p.m. He is the Kay Davis Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. The public is welcome.
“Gifts of Peace: Historical Artifacts as Reconciliation and Healing” emphasizes the power of two relics to shape human actions and experiences over time, according to Dr. Tanya Maus, director of the QHC and Peace Resource Center at WC.
“In this case, those artifacts can be directly related to peace and reconciliation by exploring their past and present social, political and cultural contexts,” she said.
The first of these is the friendship doll known as “Ellen C.,” which was sent from Wilmington to Nagasaki prefecture in 1927 in a goodwill gesture following the Immigration act of 1924, which placed a ban on all Asian immigrants to the United States. The second artifact is the wooden “Urakami Cross,” which had adorned Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral during the early 20thcentury and astonishingly survived the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing of Nagasaki in World War II.
The Urakami Cross was repatriated to the Urakami Cathedral 74 years later, on August 9, 2019, after hanging in the Peace Resource Center since the early 1980s.
“With both artifacts currently residing in Japan, the intention of the ‘Gifts of Peace’ exhibit is to visualize and share their dynamic power as artifacts for building networks of peace,” Maus added.
