In Spring 2026, Northwestern senior Maggie Munday Odom (Theatre, English Creative Writing, Environmental Policy and Culture, and Religious Studies) traveled with Erin Northington, The Block Museum’s Susan and Stephen Wilson Associate Director of Campus and Community Education and Engagement, to attend The Art of Encounter: Exploring Spiritual Engagement with Art Objects, a symposium hosted by the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame. Bringing together museum professionals, scholars, artists, and spiritual leaders, the symposium explored how museums can foster reflection, contemplation, and meaningful connection through encounters with works of art. In the reflection below, Maggie shares her experience of the symposium and considers how practices of close looking, attention, and trust can shape the ways we engage with art and with one another.

This April, I had the exciting opportunity to attend The Art of Encounter Symposium through the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame. During my four years at Northwestern, I’ve identified and cultivated an interest in museums as spaces of spiritual reflection, an interest that I’ve tended to through my work curating and facilitating programs at the student-operated Dittmar Gallery in Norris University Center, through my courses in the Religious Studies department, and through facilitating contemplative practice and mindfulness programming on campus. I was so grateful to attend The Art of Encounter Symposium alongside Erin Northington, the Block Museum’s Susan and Stephen Wilson Associate Director of Campus and Community Education and Engagement. Attending this symposium was a meaningful capstone experience for my undergraduate explorations in museums and spirituality, and served as an exciting means for me to learn more about current dialogues in this field as I seek to step into it professionally post-graduation. 

The Raclin Murphy’s position in a deeply Catholic university setting provides the museum with the unique ability to name spiritual engagement as a top priority (their mission statement asserts that the Raclin Murphy “serves and welcomes all to engage in wonder, spiritual reflection, inquiry, and research”). During a visit to the museum before the start of the symposium conversations, I enjoyed time wandering the Raclin Murphy’s galleries, where I spent significant time reflecting on the curatorial narrative in the European Art through the 1700s upstairs gallery, which organizes work into various specific devotional themes, such as worship and morality. Most memorably, I found myself catching my breath as I stepped into the Mary, Queen of Families Chapel, a functioning and actively used chapel within the museum. The chapel design is an intricate interweaving of traditional and contemporary art and its position within the museum while still being regularly used for Mass blurs and nearly erases lines between looking through art history frameworks and being with art as sacred practice.

The conversations at The Art of Encounter: Exploring Spiritual Engagement with Art Objects were lush and gifted me with a host of new curiosities. During panel programming, scholars, curators, and other museum professionals shared their varied work at the generative space where museums meet religious and spiritual reflection. Even within a specific theme, such as discussions of welcoming specific communities into museums as spiritual spaces, there was a broad swath of experiences shared, ranging from inviting a predominantly Mormon visitor base into the BYU Museum of Art to inviting an almost religion-averse visitor base of Amherst College liberal arts students into the university’s church-steepled Mead Art Museum. The rich conversations of the symposium were bookended by reflections from Reverend Ayla Lepine who offered an invitation to, through the symposium and through our museum work beyond it, open ourselves to coming to know and trust art through the devotions of time and attention.

In the vein of committing to trusting a work of art, one of the most meaningful frameworks that I am carrying with me from the symposium is one that poet, theologian, and keynote speaker Pádraig Ó Tuama shared, a framework that he uses to meet and develop a deeper relationship with a sacred text. He described looking at a sacred text in three simultaneous ways: as the text itself, as if through a piece of opaque class that allows hazy visibility beyond the text to larger contexts, and as a mirror that holds up a reflection of the individual reading the text. Ó Tuama suggested that we might map these three perspectives of reading sacred texts onto the practice of looking at art objects. He offered the following questions as invitations into this framework of looking: What are you looking at? What are you looking through? What is looking back at you?

As I’ve continued to reflect in the weeks following the symposium, I’ve returned frequently to the three-part framework offered by Pádraig Ó Tuama that offers an approach to looking at and coming to trust a work of art. To synthesize my conference reflections, I spent time applying this framework to looking anew at the Mary, Queen of Families Chapel in the Raclin Murphy. I pulled up the images that I took of the chapel on my computer, devoting time and attention to returning to its details. I looked at the work itself. I noticed how the varied shades of mosaic tile that sweep in strokes across the chapel ceiling seem to both undulate like waves and weave together like the threads of a textile. I looked through the work. I read more on Raclin Murphy’s website about the imagery that artist Mimmo Paladino incorporated into his commissioned ceiling mosaic, for instance, native Midwestern flora. His intentional iconography also includes details of the Pokagon Band of the Potawatomi’s basket-weaving patterns, a way of paying homage to the people who lived in relationship with this land long before Notre Dame was constructed. Looking through the ceiling as an opaque glass, I considered the inclusion of these symbols as a window into larger discourses about how to navigate spaces that hold meaning in Indigenous traditions and also are overlapped by sites of Christian significance, like Notre Dame. 

As I looked at the chapel and looked through the chapel like a mirror, I began to notice the emergence of the third perspective that Pádraig Ó Tuama had described in his keynote: the piece was also looking back at me. What the chapel saw in looking at me is something I’ll keep to ponder within my own heart, but I will say it was just as Reverend Ayla Lepine had described: through the devotion of time and attention, I found trust and knowing in the work, trust and knowing that evolved into something reciprocal. 

I invite you to spending time looking at the chapel for yourself, to consider what you see in and through its images. In spending time with this chapel, or with any piece, what does the art see, when like a mirror, it looks back at you?

Maggie Munday Odom is a senior in the class of 2026 at Northwestern. She is majoring in Theatre, English Creative Writing, Environmental Policy and Culture, and minoring in Religious Studies. She works as a Student Supervisor with a focus in Programs and Engagement at Norris University Center’s student-operated Dittmar Memorial Gallery, as well as the Student Program Coordinator of Mindfulness and Spiritual Wellness Initiatives at the Center for Student Advocacy and Wellness. She first connected with the Block Museum through a Spring 2024 Department of Art History course, “Museums and Responsibility,” which was taught in the Block by Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Professor of Practice in Anthropology and Block Museum Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs. She has since worked to develop a relationship between Dittmar Gallery and the Block, in particularly working with Erin Northington, the Block Museum’s Susan and Stephen Wilson Associate Director of Campus and Community Education and Engagement, and the BMSAs to partner programs through Dittmar’s Crafting Community Workshop Series that activate Block exhibitions through hands-on artmaking activities in Norris at Dittmar Gallery.

Header Image: The Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame