ADRIAN — Back in the early 1970s two Adrian Dominican Sisters who were artists, Sisters Barbara Chenicek, OP, and Rita Schiltz, OP, wanted to find a place to serve as a home for their and other sisters’ creative activities.
After an extensive search of the Adrian Dominican Sisters’ Motherhouse campus and the surrounding area, they finally found that home in what had once been the sisters’ laundry building. The renovated building contained work space for the sisters’ projects and a gallery that came to be called INAI, the Japanese word for “within.”
INAI opened in June 1973 and went on over the years to host a wide variety of exhibitions of artwork created not only by Adrian Dominicans but by many other artists as well. But a few years ago, changing space needs on the Motherhouse campus meant, among other things, that the old laundry building was destined to take on a new life as offices and shop space for the facilities and grounds personnel.
And so, INAI needed a new home. The result was the INAI at Madden Gallery, created in Madden Hall in a room near Holy Rosary Chapel that previously housed a section of the Congregation’s historical exhibits.
“It really is a perfect gallery, with the layout and the lighting,” said Sister Sue Schreiber, OP, who coordinated INAI from 2018 to 2024 and who now coordinates the new gallery as part of a committee that brought the space into being.
“It’s an entirely different feel,” she said.
The room actually has two different sections: the gallery itself and a meditation area, the walls of which contain religious artwork. One of the pieces in the meditation area, Adrian Dominican Associate Judi Engel’s sculpture “Christ Rising,” was previously in the original INAI.
INAI at Madden also includes a reading room that was created in a space nearby, in a room just off of Madden Hall’s lobby.
The new art gallery’s first exhibit, “Engage: The Art of Women,” runs from April 11 to Aug. 2. Gallery hours are from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays or by appointment by calling 517-266-4000.
Madden Hall is located at 1257 E. Siena Heights Drive, Adrian.
Parking for the artists’ reception is in the lot directly across Siena Heights Drive. Visitors to the gallery at other times should park at the Weber Retreat and Conference Center and enter Madden Hall through that building.
The inspiration for this inaugural exhibit came from the Adrian Dominican Sisters’ Enactment on Women, one of several Enactments approved by the sisters at the Congregation’s General Chapter of 2022.
In part, the Enactment reads: “Valuing human dignity and aware of the injustice of patriarchy … we strive to attain gender equity and women’s full and equal participation and decision making in Church and society.”
Schreiber said the exhibit had its genesis in a committee, headed by the late Sister Barbara Cervenka, that was formed in relation to that Enactment.
The committee decided to showcase the artwork of living and deceased Adrian Dominican Sisters as well as some Adrian Dominican Associates. Schreiber then invited members of the Adrian Center for the Arts to participate as well, as a way to include the wider local community.
In addition to Schreiber, Cervenka (who died in January) and Engel, as well as INAI’s founders, Chenicek and Schiltz (who died in 2015 and 2020, respectively), the artists featured in “Engage: The Art of Women” include Amy Philp, Kris Schmidt, Doris DeNudt, Pi Benio, and Amy Anderson; Adrian Dominican Associate Laura Law; Sisters Janet Wright, OP, Kathleen Voss, OP, Alice Van Acker, Nancyann Turner, OP, Alice Marie Schmid, OP, Barbara Quincey, OP, Aneesah McNamee, OP, Cheryl Liske, OP, and Janice Holkup, OP; and deceased Adrian Dominican Sisters Sarajane Seaver, OP, Ursula Ording, OP, Pauline Opliger, OP, Virginia Hafey-Wells, OP, and Celeste Bourke, OP.
