In the context of the opening session of the 5th International Conference on Holy Spirit Festivities to take place at the auditorium of Angra do Heroísmo Museum at 7:30 PM, this institution opens an exhibition titled "Festas do Espírito Santo: A contemporaneidade da herança açoriana" (Holy Spirit Festivities: The contemporary legacy of the Azores) at the vestry hall of Nossa Senhora da Guia Church next Thursday, May 31.

The exhibition features photographs taken by Mari Lyn and Vernon Salvador in 1976/77 and it is part of the exhibition "Portuguese religious celebrations in the Azores and California" that was open to the public at several North-American institutions as well as the Museum of Ethnology in Lisbon and in the Azores between 1981 and 1983.

Born in California in 1943, Mari Lyn Salvador has devoted her professional career to the study of ethno-aesthetics and the appreciation of art in its context of creation. Chief curator of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico since 1978, she became the director at the San Diego Museum of Man in 2005. In 2009, she was appointed director of the Emily Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California. With her husband, Vernon Salvador, a Terceira descendant, she carried out surveys and audiovisual recordings of the Holy Spirit Festivities in the Azores and in the emigrant communities of California in 1976-1978. In 2011, Mari Lyn Salvador returns to Terceira, accompanied by her son Salvador, to resume the photographic recording of Holy Spirit celebrations, thus continuing an ambitious project that aims to create, through photography, a space where the same people, those who stayed behind and those who emigrated, may connect in what has been inexorably separated by space and time.