The Art and Spirituality lecture series in honor of Brother Thomas will move to its new home at Boston College in 2025!
Date: Thursday, 13 March 2025
Time: 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Location: Boston College, Devlin Hall 101
255 Beacon St, Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
Reception to follow
This speaker series, started in March 2021, serves to honor the memory and legacy of Brother Thomas Bezanson. This lecture series will now be hosted by Boston College as part of their interdisciplinary Perspectives Program, in consultation with the Philosophy Department and interested faculty members in Art, Art History, and Film, Music, Theology, and other appropriate units within the university. The first lecture at BC (the 5th in the series overall) is scheduled for Thursday, 13 March 2025 with Jeremy Eichler as the keynote speaker. Jeremy is an American music critic and cultural historian. He was the chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe and is set to take on a newly created professorship in music history and public humanities at Tufts University. Jeremy’s book, Time’s Echo: Music, Memory and the Second World War was published in 2023.
Brother Thomas, an internationally renowned ceramic artist, was born in Nova Scotia in 1929. Thomas began to create ceramics following his graduation from college. In 1959, Thomas became a monk at Weston Priory in VT, a community of Benedictine men. While there he received a degree in philosophy from Ottawa University, Ontario in 1968. He later became artist-in-residence at Mount Saint Benedict Monastery in Erie, PA , where he worked until his death in 2007. Brother Thomas’s work has been exhibited in more than fifty solo exhibitions. His pots are held in numerous significant public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Toward the end of his life, Thomas worked with Pucker Gallery and the Boston Foundation to create a legacy that would benefit other artists through the sale of his work. The Brother Thomas Fund was established at the Boston Foundation in 2007 and fellowships are awarded to a diverse group of Greater Boston artists working in many disciplines. All Fellows receive a no-strings-attached award of $20,000 and are selected biennially through review by a panel of Boston area nonprofit arts leaders and practitioners.
Past speakers
2021 Sister Joan Chittister, Beauty, Art, Spirituality: A Study in Soul, in Spirit, in Bread and in Lilies
2022 Sister Jeanne Visel, The Spirituality of Icons
2023 Dr. Geoffrey Dunn, Bunbu Ryodo - a surgeon’s experience
2024 Rabbi William Hamilton, Doing The Impossible: The Art of bringing Spiritual Goods to Life
For more information on Jeremy Eichler, please click here.
For more information on the Brother Thomas Fund at the Boston Foundation, please click here.
For more information on the ceramic work of Brother Thomas, please click here.