Each season, FGCU Art Galleries makes space to welcome its graduates back as exhibiting artists. This year, three exhibitions carry that tradition forward: alumni in dialogue through clay; a shared road trip in pencil and verse; and a window installation woven into the front of the Arts Complex. They can be seen in the Wasmer Gallery and Gallery 101 in the Arts Complex.
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“Reflections in Clay” features work by Jordan Blankenship (2017, Art), Kel Campbell (2013, Art), and Maria Emilia Steiner (2015, Art). Blankenship’s functional ceramics and domestic structures consider how objects shape daily routines. Campbell’s wall-mounted ceramic quilt uses repetition and assembly to connect personal memory with shared histories. Steiner’s sculptural forms engage space, restraint and light to create moments of pause and attention.
Across the exhibition, clay becomes a shared material language while serving distinct purposes. These works demonstrate clay’s capacity to hold memory, shape behavior and mark our presence over time.
“Reflections in Clay” can be seen through Nov. 5.
“Road Trip: It’s the Journal Not the Destination” is a collaborative exhibition by FGCU alumna Donne Hutcheson (2018, Art) and writer Monica Sloan. Through colored pencil drawings and poetry, the artists reflect on a journey from Florida to North Carolina and back. What might have been an ordinary vacation slideshow becomes a lively exchange between words and images.
Hutcheson’s drawings shaped Sloan’s poetry, while Sloan’s writing influenced Hutcheson’s imagery. Although they traveled individually, their perspectives converged to create a shared visual, intellectual and emotional record of the journey.
“Road Trip” is on view through Oct. 30.
“Between Creation & Concrete” is a collaborative window installation by FGCU alumnae Breah Fyffe (2022, Art) and Marcela Pulgarin (2022, Art). Using freehand drawing and vinyl, the artists transform imagery inspired by Florida’s ecosystems into playful organic forms that explore connection, growth and coexistence.
The installation continues FGCU’s efforts to develop innovative bird-safe window solutions. Fyffe’s multidisciplinary practice includes painting, drawing, ceramics and printmaking. Using line, pattern and subtle variation to create tactile, contemplative compositions, Pulgarin explores relationships between natural forms, materials and the self.
FGCU’s bird-safe window initiative was launched in November 2024 through a collaboration between FGCU Art Galleries and the FGCU Ornithology Club led by Professor Oscar Johnson. The project promotes bird-safe design across campus buildings, both existing and future.
Also on view
Works from the permanent collection are on display on the third floor of the Wilson G. Bradshaw Library, behind University Archives & Special Collections. This selection features a variety of works, as well as a focus on artist and professor emeritus of printmaking (Marshall University), Peter Massing, born 1956 in Buffalo, New York.
With a natural acuity for draftsmanship, Massing’s drawing transitions intuitively into the various methods associated with lithography and intaglio printmaking. With print, the results can be replicated allowing for multiples of the same image, or unique and integrate varied printing processes to create hybrid prints where the drawing or key image has the ability to change radically.
Massing’s prints show a penchant for detail and a devotion to the draftsman’s art. He says, “I focus on printmaking, and it’s a pleasure, because I like to draw.” Words matter, too. “Words evoke images,” he explains. “Even if they don’t make sense.” His artworks are visual sonnets: compact, carefully composed and bearing many nuances.
This exhibition is on view through Dec. 4.
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Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
