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Kenney Collection on display at Quick Center

The Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts at St. Bonaventure University has opened the exhibition “20th Century European Prints from the F. Donald Kenney Collection.”

The exhibition, which can be viewed in the Winifred Shortell Kenney Gallery, features a wide array of lithographs from the collection. Kenney collected works of the European “masters” such as Renoir, Matisse, Laurencin and Picasso. The exhibition also includes prints from the Kenney collection by lesser known artists whose work has become more important with the passing of time, such as Gromaire, Villon, Forain and Decaris. In all, the exhibition with more than 30 prints highlights work of some of the most important European artists of the 20th century.

Additionally, more prints can be viewed in the current Quick Center exhibition “African Resonance: Prints from the F. Donald Kenney Collection.” This exhibition is a companion to the season’s main exhibition, “African Odyssey: The Arts and Cultures of a Continent.” Several Picasso, Braque and Miro prints illustrate the presence of African characteristics in modern art.

“The Kenney collection is so rich that we can mount two exhibitions concurrently, drawing pieces from the same collection to show both an exhibition with a specific theme and a general themed exhibition,” said Joseph LoSchiavo, executive director of The Quick Center.

Kenney’s lithograph collection was given to the Quick Center in 1999 as part of a much larger gift of more than $3 million by the Kenney Foundation. The gift funded the F. Donald Kenney Museum and Art Study Wing of The Quick Center as well as two endowments, for a curator and for upkeep of the wing named on Kenney’s behalf.

The Quick Center for the Arts at St. Bonaventure is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. All galleries are free and open to the public.

- “African Odyssey: The Arts and Cultures of a Continent,” featuring the arts and material cultures of Africa. More than 500 artifacts are on loan from Wake Forest University Museum of Anthropology, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Hampton University in Virginia.
- “Recovered Views: African American Portraits, 1912-1925.”
- “Whamm! The late 20th Century Art Scene.”
- “The St. Bonaventure University Permanent Art Collection.”

Bona's supports College Goal Sunday

St. Bonaventure’s director of financial aid joined colleagues from the area for College Goal Sunday — a volunteer program that helps students and families who need assistance in completing financial aid forms, with a particular focus on helping low-income, first-generation families.

Elisabeth Rankin volunteered at the Feb. 10 event at Jamestown High School along with high school guidance counselors from Falconer and Jamestown high schools and financial aid and other administrators from Jamestown Community College, Jamestown Business College and Buffalo State College.

“We had a tax adviser, one-on-one help completing the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid), and a computer lab where families completed FAFSAs and New York state scholarship applications online with help from the volunteers,” Rankin said.

There also was a drawing for four $500 scholarships and door prizes donated by the schools in attendance and refreshments donated by local businesses.

New York’s College Goal Sunday, traditionally held a week or two after Super Bowl Sunday, is a service project of the New York State Financial Aid Administrators Association and the New York State Higher Education Services Corp., the state financial aid agency. It is funded through a generous grant from the Lumina Foundation.

Some 40 local families attended the event in Jamestown, one of 15 College Goal Sunday sites across New York state.

“It was really gratifying to know that our time made a difference for so many families,” said Rankin.

This wrapped up the series of Financial Aid Nights that Rankin and Mary Jo Brockel, senior associate director of financial aid, attended at high schools in the surrounding area talking to families about financial aid programs and the application process for federal, state and institutional financial aid.

In celebration of Black History Month, the Damietta Center and the Diversity Action Committee will host a talk by Dr. David Anderson and a Soul Food Dinner on Sunday, Feb. 17.

Both events will take place at 4 p.m. in Doyle Dining Hall. All members of the University community are welcome to attend this free event.

Anderson will give a talk titled “Manly Virtue.” “Manly Virtue,” as articulated by Frederick Douglass in 1858, and as wrestled with by 19th and 20th century heroic figures, will be presented through readings and first-person interpretation. The audience will be challenged to employ Frederick Douglass’ articulation of “Manly Virtue” as a guide through the modern pitfalls of adolescence, courting, mating and partnering in shaping the character of women and men in today’s society.

Anderson is a Visiting Scholar at Nazareth College of Rochester. He also crafts living history reenactments, recalling the experiences of African American Union soldiers, collectively known as United States Colored Troops

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St. Bonaventure University faculty, staff and students will welcome alumni to campus this weekend for Bona's annual Homecoming Celebration.

Homecoming events will begin at 4 p.m. Friday, Feb. 15, with a student and alumni networking program in the University Club. A senior and alumni social hour from 5 to 8 p.m. at the University Rathskeller will follow.

The festivities will continue on Saturday, Feb. 16, with an open house at The Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts from noon to 4 p.m. Featured exhibitions include “Whaam! The Late 20th Century Art Scene” and “African Odyssey: The Arts and Cultures of a Continent.” New exhibitions include “Recovered Views: African American Portraits, 1912-1925.”

The Sandra A. and William L. Richter Center will be open for self-guided tours from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Café La Verna will also be open from noon to 6 p.m.

Homecoming sports will tip off at 4:30 p.m. as the St. Bonaventure women’s basketball team takes on George Washington University at Bob Lanier Court in the Reilly Center Arena. A jersey retirement ceremony for Essie Hollis, ’77, and Earl Belcher, ’81, will be held shortly after the game. Both players wore No. 25.

The St. Bonaventure men’s basketball team will play against George Washington University at 7 p.m. at Bob Lanier Court in the Reilly Center. A post-game reception with a DJ and free pizza will be held in the Rathskeller.

Homecoming Masses will be held on Sunday, Feb. 17, at 10:30 a.m. and 7 p.m. in the University Chapel. For more information on Homecoming events, call or e-mail the Office of Alumni Services: (716) 375-2302 or alumni@sbu.edu.

A new major at St. Bonaventure University will offer a degree in the rapidly growing field of bioinformatics — the field of science in which biology, mathematics and computer science merge to form a single discipline.

The recent sequencing and analysis of the genomes of dozens of species of living organisims is already shedding new light on the evolution and functioning of life on Earth. Extracting meaningful insights from this explosion of biological information requires a level of expertise in each of the areas contributing to the field of bioinformatics.

“Bioinformatics serves both as a tool for biologists and as a challenge for the computer scientist. Biologists use off-the-shelf software, often in extremely clever ways, to suggest what experiments they should do, while computer scientists search for new algorithms to extract meaning from a flood of biological information,” said Dr. Michael Klucznik, assistant professor of mathematics and director of the bioinformatics program at St. Bonaventure.

“A draft sequence of the human genome was first published just five years ago and already bioinformatics has played a key role in advances in medicine, evolutionary biology, microbiology and drug development. I am excited that St. Bonaventure will train future scientists in this growing field,” said Dr. Michael J. Fischer, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs at the University.

Students will be able to tailor the bioinformatics major to their interests, focusing more on either experimental or computational approaches. The major is capped by a bioinformatics seminar in which students explore and discuss cutting-edge research in the field.

Undergraduates earning a bachelor of science degree in bioinformatics will have an interdisciplinary knowledge base ideally suited to pursuing graduate studies in bioinformatics, genomics, molecular biology, computational biology, protein chemistry and allied fields.

With the recent approval of the program by the State Education Department, students can begin taking courses in the new program this fall. For more information about the bioinformatics program, go to www.sbu.edu >> searchword: bioinformatics.

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Check out the Career Center’s Event’s page to find information on the upcoming student program “Backpack to Blackberry.” Also available on the page is this month’s issue of the Career Center’s newsletter, Directions, which contains information on Teacher Recruitment Days and Alumni/Student Networking: Meet & Mingle.

Date: Friday, Feb. 15, 2008
Speaker: Leslie Chambers
Time: 12:20 to 1:30 p.m.
Place: the University Club
Topic: Formats and Strategies for Distance Education/Online Learning
Abstract: A variety of course formats will be presented with examples and resources. Strategies for encouraging participation and interaction will also be included. Handouts of Web resources and research articles will also be available.
Cost: $3

Dr. Jeffrey Peterson, professor of finance and chair of the Department of Finance, Giles Bootheway, lecturer in finance, and MBA student Borko Tesic had their paper “Financial Determinants of Faculty Salaries at Private Master’s Granting Institutions” accepted for publication in the 2008 Business Research Yearbook. The paper models cross-sectional faculty salary differentials as a function of enrollment, net revenue per student and endowment per student. Additionally, some evidence of a positive link between faculty salaries and institutional participation in NCAA Division I athletics is provided.