Virginia Chieffo Raguin

Biography

Both in teaching and scholarship, Dr. Virginia Raguin is interested in religious art of all kinds, patterns of collecting and intersections of the visual image and written culture. Most recently, Raguin edited Art, Piety, and Destruction in the Christian West, 1500-1700, Ashgate, 2010. Raguin also worked with Sarah Stanbury, Department of English, and photographed East Anglian churches and guild halls to explore the physical context of medieval literary figures such as Julian of Norwich (Revelations) William Langland (Piers Plowman) Margery Kempe (The Book of Margery Kempe) and John Lydgate (poetry). Raguin has team-taught with many other professors at the College, in Music, History and Literature, and has been involved in both the Divine and the Natural World clusters of the Montserrat program.

Many of Raguin's publications focus on stained glass, both historic and modern, as in Stained Glass from its Origins to the Present with Abrams (USA) and Thames and Hudson (GB) in 2003. A member of the International Corpus Vitrearum, Raguin has co-authored Stained Glass before 1700 in the Midwest United States (Harvey Miller Press, London, 2002). Raguin also wrote the catalogue essay for Kiki Smith's exhibition in the Pace Gallery, New York: Kiki Smith: Lodestar, 2010. Raguin is currently working on Stained Glass before 1700 in California (vol. 1, Los Angeles). Stained Glass: Radiant Art, a richly illustrated guide to the collection of medieval and Renaissance stained glass in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, was published in 2013. From over 30 years of collaborative exchange with colleagues in 20 countries, Raguin has been deeply involved in questions of conservation and the commitment of maintaining historic sites as essential aspects of culture. 

Raguin's museum exhibits have included Glory in Glass: Stained Glass in the United States: Origin, Variety and Preservation, 1998-99, and Reflections on Glass: 20th Century Stained Glass in American Art and Architecture, 2002-03, at the Gallery at the American Bible Society. At the College, Raguin has exhibited Catholic Collecting, Catholic Reflection 1538-1850: Objects as a measure of reflection on a Catholic past and the construction of recusant identity in England and America at the Cantor Art Gallery in 2006. Most recently, Raguin organized Pilgrimage and Faith: Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, a traveling exhibition with venues in Worcester, Chicago, Richmond and The Rubin Museum of Art, New York, from 2010 through 2011.

Raguin has a collection of 19th-century religious art, predominantly prints, many in their original frames. They include Lutheran baptismal certificates (in German), Catholic marriage and communion certificates (in French, German, and English), devotional imagery, including a Currier and Ives Sacred Heart of Mary, an Italian (Naples) image of St. Rocco, patron of victims of the plague, a Polish Virgin and Child, a Hispanic image of Christ in Gethsemane and Currier and Ives prints, such as The Mother's Dream, Looking unto Jesus and Bed Time (a mother teaching her young children to say their prayers).