WILMINGTON — Student workers have begun making the displays that will be showcased at the Quaker Heritage Center’s (QHC) spring 2020 exhibit, “Gifts of Peace.”

“Gifts of Peace: Historical Artifacts as Reconciliation and Healing” will emphasize the power of two artifacts — the friendship dolls given by Americans to children in Japan in 1927 and 2019, and the “Urakami Cross” which adorned Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral and withstood the atomic bombing of Nagasaki 75 years ago.

Wilmington College work-study students are being assisted by local artists Jason and Margaret Morgan who advise the student workers — not necessarily art majors — in the designing of the displays.

The exhibit will open 6 p.m. March 16 in the Quaker Heritage Center at the Boyd Cultural Arts Center at Wilmington College. The displays are closely tied to an August 2019 trip when QHC Director Tanya Maus and local Pastor Nancy McCormick visited Nagasaki and presented handcrafted dolls to children and, in the same trip, repatriated the wooden cross, originally found in the ruins of the cathedral.

Among other figures, the exhibit will include students’ creations depicting the cathedral in Nagasaki and the symbolic landmark Genbaku Dome in Hiroshima which has been kept there in the gutted state left by the atomic blast.

On the same evening as the exhibit opening, Northwestern University Professor of Anthropology Hirokazu Miyazaki will deliver a lecture at the college reflecting on the gifts of the dolls and the return of the cross. The lecture will be from 7 to 8 p.m.

Reach Gary Huffenberger at 937-556-5768.