Greetings world! My name is Liam Brew, and I am currently a senior at Loyola University Chicago pursuing a major in history and a minor in English. This semester, I am interning with Professor Stephen Schloesser and am helping in a project centered around the life and art of Father Nicholas Point, a nineteenth century Jesuit who lived and ventured in the American frontier and interacted with native Americans. After speaking with Professor Schloesser a week ago, we agreed that my duties for the next few months would be to research Point's life and art, analyze or interpret many of his drawings, categorize said drawings based upon basic chronology or theme, and write wall texts for each piece for an exhibition occurring some time in the near future. 


Having been given a packet of several dozen 

drawings, depicting frontier Jesuit missions, native American villages and warriors as well as landscapes of the soon-to-be American countryside, I became excited at the prospect of learning more about an area of American history I know relatively little about. Throughout my collegiate career, I have focused on modern European history, and I welcome the chance to learn about frontier history. In preparation to cataloging and categorizing Point's pieces, I will be reading Wilderness Kingdom and Sacred Encounters along with a standard biography of Point's life in the frontier. 


The internship itself is mutli-layered and consists of several well defined tasks. In order to create a general or basic chronology of Point's pieces, I will be gleaming clues and hints that indicate the year and location of the drawing. I will also be tasked with categorizing the pieces in terms of their themes and subjects. Essentially, I am in charge of analyzing and organizing one wall of Point's art for the exhibition at the Loyola University Museum of Art, and writing wall texts for each piece. Given the antonymous nature of the internship, I will doing the vast majority of these tasks in my apartment or in the Loyola University library.  And so begins the adventure into the life, times and works of Father Nicholas Point!

See you again,

Liam