Written by Denise Pullen

I once overheard an Art student talking about a bracelet they made in one of their jewelry classes.  They said their instructor’s feedback was that it needed to “say something.”  They wondered why they couldn’t make something that “just looks pretty.” Since that day, I ask myself that question when I am teaching, when I am  watching my students collaborate or rehearse, and when I am writing:  Does it have meaning?  Does it matter if it has meaning?  Does it matter at all? 

The creation of a bracelet -  the materials, the textures, the colors, the patterns - do they matter?  The composition of a simple folk song or an opus -  the range, the power, the poetry,  the variations - is this worthy of praise or purchase?  The production of a play, taking the idea from the page to the stage - the conceptualization, the collaboration, the construction of set and costumes, hours upon hours of preparation - will it matter?  The last line is spoken, the house lights come up, and the magic vanishes.  Or does it? 

Maybe that bracelet will be given to someone who wears it everyday because they love it, or they love the artist.  Or the bracelet will break and the beads scatter.  That piece of music may be recorded and reach appreciative ears, or not.  It may move some to tears.  The impact of a play may spark debate on the drive home.  It may stir up memories of the familiar, or feelings long forgotten.  It may have made someone change their mind, or their heart. 

Does it matter?  What matters may simply be the act of creation.    

One of the core principles of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition is the Appreciation of Creation.  The act of creating, the gift of creating, is built into us by our Creator.  It mirrors His creation.   Artists’ inborn need to create and the human inclination to consume the artists’ work are essential to our understanding of the world,  and our purpose within it. Under the constraints of insufficient funding, political and social indifference, censorship, religious influence, and the outright stifling by oppressive governments, the Arts have endured, and will endure.  Attacks on creative process and artistic expression will not stop it. Art will endure. Seton Hill students will continue to create sculptures, musical compositions and plays, and they will share them to change hearts and minds in their communities. 

In “The Catholic intellectual Tradition, Core Principle for the College or University” (ACCU), 

 appreciation of beauty and the act of creating are defined as core principles:

VI:  POWER OF BEAUTY

“The awareness of beauty is one of the most profound qualities of

a Catholic humanism….  The university is charged with the promotion and

analysis of the arts and sciences as manifestations of beauty.”

VII:  APPRECIATION OF CREATION

“Study of the physical world - - -  from the cosmos to the molecular

level - - - is a means to grow closer to God through understanding

the universe he created…In all its beauty and complexity.”  

Every piece of art examines the question, “Who Am I?”, when it is authentic and vulnerable.  The question “Why am I here?” gives dramatic writers and actors the charge to analyze human behavior, typically championing people who are living to the best of their abilities, no matter how flawed, in an effort to find their place in the world. Painting and sculpture demand that artists see angles and dimensions in every object and person.  Music appeals directly to the emotions; gives the greater part of interpretation to the listeners; encourages them to open their hearts and imaginations to what really matters in their relationships with people, the earth, and their God. Students and faculty in arts therapies ask the question “What does the world need?” on an immediate, individual, and human level.  They are ministers in real and practical ways, healing spirits through sensory expression.  All art study and exploration seeks to question and reveal universal truths.  Whether examining  the ideal and sublime, or the most base and inhuman -  through political, social, and spiritual inquiry - art asks the question, “How ought we to live?”

Creation in community inspires the Setonian spirit - past, present, and future.  It is palpable from the first encounter at Seton Hill University.  It travels through the hallways, like  its own music.  It provides meaning to study in the classrooms, labs and rehearsal rooms.  Kathleen Campbell, Emeritus Professor of Music, expresses this act of  community creation as “really about love and mercy.”  (3) That love and mercy, shared in thousands of words and actions daily, is the Setonian Spirit, seeded by the Sisters of Charity  and nurtured by all who feed its life force. 

The Sisters of Charity understood the need to educate students in the creative process. Beginning with primary and secondary schools, dramatic, musical and the visual arts have been central since the Sisters began their educational work in 1870.  They founded the Seton Hill Schools of Art & Music in Greensburg,  preceding the establishment of Seton Hill College 1918.  

The first degrees at Seton Hill College were earned by  Music majors Othelia Averman Vogel and Maria Caveney Coolihan in June of 1919.  Maria Caveney returned to teach at the college from 1920 to 1930.  

The Sisters’ commitment to the arts in education extended far beyond  Seton HIll. In the 1960’s the Sisters founded the Frederick Ozanam Cultural Center on Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Hill district.  Sister Francis Assisi Gorham taught music to the Hill’s underserved youth.  The Center became the home for Ozanam Strings, a Black music ensemble that toured nationally and produced two albums.  Today the facility  is a dynamic athletic center  for area youth. In 2024, student athletes from Seton Hill visited Ozanam, engaging in activities with the students. Reports from both sides -  “eye opening”…  “life changing.”

In the Hill District, the Sisters of Charity were also involved with the family of Pittsburgh-born playwright, August Wilson. When his family (Kittel) encountered problems with discrimination in the school system, the Sisters saw to it that all of the children were given a solid education and access to spiritual resources by the Sisters of Charity. 

In recent years, in response to the removal of arts programming in elementary and high schools, the Sisters of Charity and Seton Hill established Seton Arts Service Corps, which brings arts education and experiences to underserved communities. The program provides young students a third space at Seton Hill, with instruction from current students in the Visual and Performing Arts.  Each cohort of students, young and younger, find fulfillment creating in community. 

It is not unusual for Seton Hill’s own students to return to their alma mater. Professor Kathleen Campbell’s presence at Seton Hill spanned more than six decades. First, as a student in the children’s music classes and the child of a faculty member, Kathleen returned as an undergraduate Music major and subsequently served on the faculty in the department for forty-three years. As Archivist Casey Bowser remarked, “Seton Hill has raised many of its own.” (2)

Artists will create.  They will create wherever they can. They created in the sub-basements of Canevin and Maura Halls, where Sister Josefa Filkosky and Sister Mary Kay Neff taught sculpture and graphic arts; in Cecilian Hall where students sang;  to the glorious Carol Ann Reichgut Hall in the Performing Arts Center built in 2009, where traditional, sacred, folk, and commercial music is made;  in the 20 x 20 Reeves Lecture Hall where the department found room for as many as 20 performers and musicians for its musicals; and St. Mary’s Hall where students tap danced on the same floors early St. Joseph’s Academy music students once tapped time like metronomes; and now in the state-of-the art, flexible Monsignor William Granger Ryan Theatre, where actors and dancers showcase their work.  While it wouldn’t happen for decades, Monsignor Ryan, who served as President of Seton Hill from 1948 until 1970, was devoted to giving students creative spaces on campus. He had plans drawn several times, including a fully rendered design of an Arts Complex by architect Philip Johnson that would crown the campus. This facility was never built, but every inch of the Performing Arts Center is employed by grateful artists. 

In my office in the Performing Arts Center are hundreds of books.  These include anthologies, scholarly works on dramatic philosophy and form, single plays and collections from Ancient Greek to new plays currently in production in New York and throughout the world.  Many of these were left to me by my predecessor, Professor Iva Saraceni.  Many of those were left to her by her colleague, Sister Zoe Dorsa.  Iva and Sister Zoe were colleagues in the arts at Seton Hill.  Sister Zoe administered the Speech and Theatre Department from 1961 until Gene and Iva Saraceni began their tenure from 1966 until 2002.

Sister Vivien Linkauer, a former Professor of French and Assistant to the Dean of Women was a roommate of Sister Zoe, who she describes as “definitely more progressive” in her practice. Both Sisters arrived at Seton Hill in 1966.  Sister Zoe had recently returned from completing her MA in Theatre at the University of Denver. Sister Vivien, new to teaching college French, and admittedly more introverted, remembers Sister Zoe as spirited and outspoken, so much so that she convinced the college to offer a degree in Communications. 

Iva Saraceni wrote these loving and amusing remarks in a retirement tribute to her colleague Sister Zoe:

“ As Dean of Students she rode the bucking of the student pulse through the late Sixties and early Seventies, dismounting perhaps a bit sore and bruised, but never thrown. Never, never thrown! The college climate changed because she saw that it must and saw to it that it did. Seton Hill lightened up, laid back, cooled off. The finishing school began to realize that absolute rules and absolute models might not be the best way to encourage free thought and individual identity, and while it never became a Bennington or an Antioch, still, during that relatively short period, it "came a long way baby." 

Wheels! She needs wheels. She negotiates a used car for the theatre department and runs a tour, merrily careening over the winding roads of Western Pennsylvania at dawn with six or seven students, costumes and set pieces in a terminally ill, Olds convertible. They take Chekhov to the highschools, culture to Appalachia. She is Mama Rose in stale, sweat smelling, tiled wings of high school gymnasiums calling, "Sing out Joey!" "Hold your head up Danny!" "Patty, for goodness sake, don't upstage yourself!" 

Space! She needs space. Tours to Europe, student trips to the Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Ontario. 

She rescues: shy people at noisy parties, new people reticent about joining in and taking part, late adolescents in the first real catastrophes of their young lives, small children needing an outing, abandoned kittens-virus infected and wormy. Anyone's life could be much better managed if  she manages it. And she does. And usually, she's right! 

 "Hazard yet forward" can be interpreted many ways. Some seem to see it as a kind of tentative,

anxiety riddled groping, others as empty-headed Quixotic storming of windmills. It really depends on whether one emphasizes "Hazard" or "Forward." If, however, one gives the word hazard a slight secondary stress with an upward inflection, pauses, then emphatically lifts the last two words drawing out the vowels of the last one in a call to arms- one for the gipper- evangelical sort of way, one will have defined her.

St. Joan!

Evita!

Medea!

Mt. St. Helen!

Zoe!

 I will be forever grateful that Zoe was Dean of Students when I cut up the commencement curtains to costume Lady Bracknell; any other administrator would have hung me in their place.

My daughter, the child I was carrying then, is now a Seton Hill sophomore. She said yesterday,

"I sure am going to miss that lion on the door of Zoe's office in Lowe."  (3)

In 1988, a little over a year later, Sister Zoe and Sister Viven were with Gene and Iva when the crushing call came - their daughter Elyse’s death was confirmed. In December, Elyse and another Seton Hill student, Beth Ann Johnson, were killed when terrorists bombed their plane over Lockerbie, Scotland. They were returning from study abroad. “Dark times,” say former Music Professors and the Sarceni’s close friends, Marvin and Shirley Huls.  “Dark times.”  (4)

A tearful Sister Vivien recalls seeing Elyse sitting in a windowsill in Cecilian Hall, window wide open.  “She was special, full of life” says Sister Vivien. (5)  Today, an award is given annually to a Visual and Performing Arts student who, like Elyse, is a “spunky lover of life.”  

Art endures. By the spring semester, Iva and Gene returned to their beloved and bereaved students. Perhaps they found the need to create in community more powerful than ever.  Iva would direct the more edgy pieces and teach acting, while Gene directed classical works and taught speech classes.  In my first year as a faculty member, my office was next to Gene’s. I could hear the droning of students’ recorded voices as he corrected their speech assignments.  A drillmaster to be sure, he demanded discipline. Those students would be heard and understood!  During a school matinee, while delivering the students’ boxed lunches at intermission, I encountered Gene posting the cast list for the next production.  It’s a tough profession, and he would prepare them for that.  They would do the second act as rehearsed, regardless of the role they did or didn’t get. Tough love. Following Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton’s charge, students would be “fit for the world in which they would live. “  

Replacing Iva’s position upon her retirement in 2002,  it immediately became clear to me how much the students loved her.  It was not an easy first year. Their attachment to Iva was so strong I wondered if they had been with her all of her 35 years.  With Gene still there for that first year, at times I felt like the wicked stepmother.  The Provost remarked at the end of the first year, “You survived.” 

 As the union of Music and Theatre, under the direction of Marvin Huls and Gene Saraceni, created the Musical Theatre major and both programs would share a home in “the PAC.”under the direction of Marvin Huls and Theatre, headed by Gene Saraceni had created the Musical Theatre major,  these disciplines  would finally share a home in “the PAC.”  The Saracenis are still very present in our learning space. Not only did they provide performers the very floor they stand on, they help those students leap forward to work in their profession with funding they established  for travel expenses for auditions and other professional opportunities. 

The shaping of the Setonian ethic was entrusted to lay faculty and staff working alongside the Sisters over the decades. The Saracenis trained students in all aspects of theatre, in classical and contemporary texts and methods, seeing many of them reach professional level. Along with others like Marvin and Shirley Huls, they continued to develop as artists themselves.  Professor Kathleen Campbell is largely responsible for founding Westmoreland Symphonic Winds.  Professor Maureen Kochanek (Vissat) taught Art History to hundreds of adoring students over her 43 years at Seton Hill.  These Setonians, among many others, created in community with colleagues and students who continue to do so through their inspired work.  

In the wake of Vatican II, and with the awakening in women’s rights, many Sisters left the  convent. While holding strong to the values of Catholicism and community, some recognized their need for autonomy and self-expression better served in secular life.  Lay faculty took up the charge to “hazard yet forward.”  

Sister Mary Kay Neff, who teaches graphic and interactive design, recalls Sister Josefa Filkosky, an accomplished artist and former Sister of Charity who taught in the Art Department from 1955 to 1999.  She describes Josefa as “dynamic … having a vision. She pushed the Seton Hill administration to create new classes and programs in Graphic Design and Art Therapy.”  

After her difficult decision to leave the religious community, Josefa’s work literally took new shape as she produced large, flowing, colorful metal sculptures that have found their home at Seton Hill and across the country.  When she needed it,  Josefa was given support for her work, and a station wagon to haul it in by a generous benefactor named C. Allen Harlan of Pittsburgh Power Piping Company.  She would exhibit her award-winning work while continuing her teaching at Seton Hill.  Her work is featured throughout the campus and the country. One of her sculptures now adorns the entrance to the Seton Hill Arts Center, an architectural  award-winning building where onlookers can see dancers floating and spinning past the wall of windows in the beautiful corner studio. 

President JoAnn Boyle ushered in a new era in the Arts at Seton Hill.  As the college struggled in the 1980s to maintain and grow enrollment,  and to define itself after transitioning to a co-educational institution, the Arts endured.  Strongly supported by President Boyle, they  became “signature programs,”  as they had been in Seton Hill College’s inception. President Boyle set a foundation stone  in the beautiful new Performing Arts Center (PAC) in 2009, which brought Seton Hill down from “the Hill” into the heart of the downtown Greensburg’s cultural center.   A lover of Shakespeare, President Boyle insisted that a balcony be built outside of the Ridge Studio, imagining Romeo standing on the corner of West Otterman and Harrison, calling up to his beloved Juliet. Perhaps the opportunity should have been taken in 2020, when audiences were entertained outdoors, or, sadly, on computer screens. 

We all remember where we were when we heard the news.  Covid made its unwelcome entrance in March of 2020.  Campus would close, and remote learning would begin in five days time.  And it did.  Dancers danced in their dens.  Art supplies were shipped across the country.  Choirs and soloists learned to keep time with digital delay.  The Zoom era was born, and disinfectant wipes nearly went extinct.  By the fall semester, in true Setonian spirit, in-person classes resumed.  All in education emulated the Greeks and wore masks, stifling their breath, killing their consonants, and fogging their glasses.  But art endures.  After a brave attempt to record  HAMLET in backstage stations, allowing some semblance of ensemble, alas, Denmark moved to student dorms.  Dancers performed with an audience outdoors in April 2021 -  in 43 degree temperatures, amid hailstorms.   

The founders instilled a strong will and a responsibility to help those suffering persecution and loss. The Visual and Performing Arts have often collaborated with Seton Hill’s National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education. Under the direction of Sister Gemma Del Duca and Sister Noel Kernan, Wilda Kaylor and Professor Jim Paharik, the Center has commissioned and supported plays such as Arlene Hutton’s LETTERS FROM SALA (2019); Amy Hartman’s MAZEL (2006), after which Jack Sittsamer, a Holocaust survivor spoke to students and audience members; and KINDERTRANSPORT by Diane Samuels. The Art Department recently exhibited several Holocaust-related programs. “From Darkness to Light,” a collection of mosaics inspired by the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh was displayed in the Jodee Harris Gallery in the Seton Hill Art Center in  2022. “The Banner Project,” where students created banners on themes such as “Why Do We Love Silently, But Hate Openly” was presented  in the Harlan Gallery during the 2012 Ethel LeFrak Holocaust Conference. (6) The Music Department participates in the annual Kristallnacht services, and has presented several concerts on Holocaust themes. In 2024, Westmoreland Symphonic Winds presented “Homage,”  (7) a concert dedicated to Professor Kathleen Campbell’s contributions to Seton Hill, to the loss of Elyse Saraceni and Beth Ann Johnson, and to the return of live music following the Covid pandemic. 

In recent years, in response to the removal of arts programming in elementary and high schools, the Sisters of Charity and Seton Hill were inspired  to establish Seton Arts Service Corps, which brings arts education and experiences to underserved communities. The program provides young students a place to create at Seton Hill, with instruction from current students in the Visual and Performing Arts.  Each cohort of students, young and younger, find fulfillment creating in community. 

We find ourselves at a time in our country, in our world, where systems created for the common good are being dismantled.  Social services are being stripped from those who need them most.  Acceptance of all identities is going in the wrong direction. Gains in social justice are being undone with executive orders. Creative thought is being stifled in academic institutions, where it should be supported. Misuse of artificial Intelligence threatens writers and actors.. The Arts are not only being ignored, they are under attack. 

 In the words of Toni Morrison, revered Nobel and Pulitzer- awarded poet: 

I want to remind us all that art is dangerous. I want to remind you of the history of artists who have been murdered, slaughtered, imprisoned, chopped up, refused entrance. The history of art, whether it’s in music or written or what have you, has always been bloody, because dictators and people in office and people who want to control and deceive know exactly the people who will disturb their plans.

And those people are artists. They’re the ones that sing the truth. And that is something that society has got to protect.

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.“  (Toni Morrison) 

Singer, performer and producer Maggie Rogers shared this in the New York Times opinion page  

What would she tell herself 9 years ago at her graduation?

“ … keep the dreams bigger than the fear.”

“I’d tell her that her most important collaborator is not a person; it’s a moment. “

Our students are living in a moment of great turmoil and change. They have been exposed to the absolute worst of humanity (often in those who should be revered), war and genocide,  natural and man-made disasters, missed experiences because of Covid 19.  But they have minds and souls capable of seeing possibility for recovery and hope. The act of creating, especially creating in community, may be the very definition of hope.  Hope that is found in our students. 

In his 2025 commencement speech, Seton Hill graduate and Class President John Giansante reminded his colleagues, their families, and faculty and staff what it means to be Setonian: 

Somewhere between the music rehearsals, Track & Field competitions, Campus Ministry, and everything else happening on this Hill, I realized that college wasn’t just about chasing the plan you walked in with. It was about becoming the kind of person you never imagined you could be.

And I know I’m not alone in that.

Each of us came here with our own goals and identities—athletes, artists, musicians, future doctors, first-generation students…  the list goes on. Some of us knew exactly what we wanted. Some of us had no clue. And some of us completely changed our minds halfway through.

But the beauty of this place is that we didn’t have to figure it all out on day one. We just had to keep showing up.

Because over the past few years, we’ve all figured some things out—about who we are, who we want to be, and how to keep going.

That’s what Seton Hill taught us.

That’s what Hazard Yet Forward means, and if there’s one thing the Class of 2025 knows how to do, it’s grow.

We’ve grown through losses and wins—on the field, on the stage, in the classroom, and in life.

And through it all, we built something real—We built community.

John Giansante, President of Seton Hill Class of 2025 

Community matters.  Art  matters.  Art Endures.