4 minute read
ST. CECILIA WE
We Love You St. Cecilia
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echo the words of the school’s alma mater. For artist Mary Borgen, creating the mosaic of St. Cecilia for the new fine arts gallery was indeed a work of love. “Art for me is something that I have always just had to do,” she says. “It is a large part of who I am. I have always clung to the fact that art is a verb of being, which helps me understand that God created me with a love and drive to create art.” Mary’s initial background was in art history at Tulane University. She pursued further training in painting at Parsons School of Design, but it has only been in the last 15 years that she forayed into mosaics, captivated by their colors and textures.
9 feet tall and is composed of hundreds and hundreds of pieces of exquisitely variegated glass. Before it was delivered to SCA, the mosaic was blessed by Deacon Rob Montini.
Mary admits she especially agonized over the face of St. Cecilia, redoing it several times before achieving the look she wanted. While she worked, she says that she prayed rosary after rosary, asking for inspiration. The sisters had asked her to replicate an image of St. Cecilia from the stained glass window in the original 1888 chapel at the Motherhouse. The idea was that this new mosaic, inspired by that stained glass window and the original Raphael painting, would serve as a visual link between the Motherhouse and Harding Pike locations where St. Cecilia Academy has continuously educated girls an immensely beautiful world in which to live. I think of how much He must love us!”
Mary Borgen thinks the new Fine Arts Center at St. Cecilia provides a most conducive space for developing artists who can express themselves and discover both the beauty of the world around them and the beauty within. She reflects how, in the artistic process, the artist “turns inward, she asks herself questions, she makes decisions. The girls may even find they are praying and talking to God. I have seen it happen often when a person dives deeply inside herself, then creates a work of art, and ultimately is amazed at what she has created. Somewhere along the way she will recognize and ponder the power of Divine inspiration.” ◊
A LABOR OF LOVE When the Dominican Sisters at St. Cecilia approached her about doing a mosaic of St. Cecilia to grace the new fine arts gallery hall, she was thrilled. She had worked with the sisters on another large mosaic for the Bethany Retreat House and admits, “From the minute I stepped on the Dominican Campus, I fell in love with it. I thought, ‘I want to make a mosaic for St. Cecilia,’ but I didn’t say it because I didn’t want to be pushy.”
Once Mary set to work, she often worked 16 hour days to assure the piece would be finished for the dedication of the new building. Her husband Scott custom-designed the wood frame, after which Mary sketched out the figure and the graphic elements of the mosaic before selecting the glass and cutting each piece by hand to fit in the image. At the end of the process, she removed all the grout and glue and sanded the entire surface to achieve a high polish where the true colors re-emerge. The finished mosaic stands over for 160 years. Although the Raphael St. Cecilia features a Renaissance ideal, Mary wanted her St. Cecilia to have a more contemporary face and be someone the students could relate to. “I wanted them to look at her and think, ‘I can be a saint, too,’” says Mary. “During the artistic process, I prayed that, added to the hundreds of people she converted in her lifetime, and no doubt thousands of people throughout the ages, St. Cecilia would continue to pray in a special way for every single SCA girl who walked past or glanced at her image at school.”
When asked how beauty manifests the reality of God, Mary responds unhesitatingly, “Beauty and faith are inextricably connected in my mind, since I find God first and foremost in every part of nature. One of my favorite Scripture verses is Romans 1:20, ‘...Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made.’ God has given us such
Mary, her husband Scott, and a team install the finished St. Cecilia mosaic in the new fine arts gallery.
