Dr. Mary Harvey is a psychologist, a founding director of the Victims of Violence program at the Cambridge Health Alliance, and a new student in the SMFA’s Diploma program. She is not, she insists, an authority in mounting art shows. But late last fall, she noticed that several fellow students in her monoprint class—Gail Bos, John Avakian, and Danielle Bass—were creating work that focused on the trauma of violence. She got an idea. Why not organize a small exhibit that would address, she says, “the impact of violence and the possibility of art transforming the experience.”

After a few frenzied months of planning, “Violence Transformed” will run April 23–27 in Doric Hall at the Massachusetts State House. It is anything but small. Coinciding with National Crime Victims Awareness Week and the Massachusetts Victims Rights Conference, the exhibit will feature a diverse spectrum of work that ranges from painting, photography, and prints to video and digital installations, spoken-word and performance pieces, and shrines and peace gardens. “Things have gotten way beyond what I ever imagined,” Harvey says.

Harvey and other exhibit organizers—“people who knew what they were doing,” she says wryly—structured the show as a broad collaboration. They invited a group of curators from around the city, some art professionals, some not, to assemble artwork that would highlight different facets of brutality and aggression, such as political violence and violence against women and youth. The exhibit brings together artists, academics, museum professionals, and community service providers who share a common goal: to confront and challenge the prevalence of violence in contemporary society.

As for Harvey, she has cut back her responsibilities as a psychologist to take Museum School classes in painting, drawing, and printmaking. “I’ve always loved the process of artmaking,” she says. Decades ago, she started college as an art major before switching to psychology, but recent eye surgery provided her with a wake-up call, she says. “I knew I’d better go back to making art while I still can.”

Pictured: Mary Harvey, Monoprint 1, 2006.