
Featured Exhibit
Bicentennial: Regionally Related Works from the Permanent Collection
February 1, 2025 - July 13, 2025
Weil Gallery
Bicentennial is an exhibition celebrating the vibrant artistic voices of our region. This curated collection features works by local artists alongside pieces that reflect our community's cultural, historical, and natural essence. From evocative landscapes to thought-provoking contemporary creations, the exhibit showcases the talent and diversity that make our region unique.
Join us in exploring the intersection of place, identity, and artistic expression, as we honor the creativity rooted in our local soil and the stories that resonate far beyond.
Current Exhibits
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"Bicentennial": Regionally Related Works from the Permanent Collection
January 1, 2025 - July 13, 2025
Weil Gallery
Bicentennial is an exhibition celebrating the vibrant artistic voices of our region. This curated collection features works by local artists alongside pieces that reflect our community's cultural, historical, and natural essence. From evocative landscapes to thought-provoking contemporary creations, the exhibit showcases the talent and diversity that make our region unique.
Join us in exploring the intersection of place, identity, and artistic expression, as we honor the creativity rooted in our local soil and the stories that resonate far beyond.
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Bonnie Stahlecker: "Living on the Outer Edge of Hope"
May 3, 2025 - September 14, 2025
McDonald Gallery
“For nearly a decade, I’ve used the boat as a metaphor - navigating turbulent times and moving toward an unknown future. Hope, to me, is not passive but an act of resistance. These works reflect shifting emotional states: from calm perseverance to near panic. Confluence symbolizes unity and optimism, while Spiraling speaks to disorientation and despair. Together, they chart a journey through struggle, resilience, and the enduring possibility of hope.”
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SAQA: "A Drop of Emerald Poison"
May 3, 2025 - September 14, 2025
East Gallery
“Studio Art Quilt Associates, Inc. (SAQA) is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote the art quilt: "a creative visual work that is layered and stitched or that references this form of stitched layered structure."
In 1777, the color, Scheel’s Green, was discovered, and later in 1814, the much improved Paris Green was developed. Both pigments were created by chemists and produced a remarkable shade of emerald green by combining chemicals that produced arsenic poison. This vibrant green was extremely popular among the privileged because it symbolized royalty and wealth. Despite the deadly drawbacks, fashions, wallpaper, soaps, paints, and toys were produced in abundance. Factory workers who produced these commodities, as well as consumers, suffered severe side effects, including death. By the end of the 19th century, the deadly greens were replaced with less toxic pigments and dyes.
The art quilts produced for “A Drop of Emerald Poison” will have just a touch of today’s safe emerald green as a reminder of the tragic history of the color green.
This exhibit is a collaboration between 3 regional groups of SAQA - Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.
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Craig Martin: "Flowers on the Battlefield"
May 24, 2025 - September 7, 2025
Shook Gallery
Craig Martin’s mixed media drawings, consisting primarily of pastel, acrylic, and conté pencil on a wood panel or paper, emphasize the natural floral environment of growth, fragility, and decay. The drawings are created through both direct observation and photo reference. Still, emphasis is always on a creative use of color to expand upon the “natural” view and to reflect an active drawing style. Expressive color, primarily through soft pastel pigments, can many times be un-fixed, suggestive, and intermittent, reflecting the ever-present fluctuations of wind, movement, and light.
In challenging times, the fragility of art objects may be the perfect reminders of what we are in our better selves – much as flowers growing on battlefields can be the perfect reminders of the futility of our tumultuous history in the grand scheme of things.
Upcoming Exhibits
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Charles Gick: "The Earth Moves Through Us"
East Gallery
October 4, 2025 - February 22, 2026
Charles A. Gick is an interdisciplinary artist who combines and moves between painting, video, performance, photography, sculpture, and installation art. His work continues to receive both national and international recognition. He was the first recipient of the Purdue University Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.
Gick has also exhibited his work in several international group exhibitions in countries such as Korea, Kosovo, Cyprus, Bulgaria, and Russia, and was selected as the only US representative included in “Curated Special Selections from Videoholica,” which was exhibited in Belgrade, Serbia, Milan, Italy, and Copenhagen, Denmark. He has presented artist lectures and academic research nationally and internationally. Gick received his BFA Degree in Painting and Printmaking from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA Degree in Painting from Northwestern University. He is currently a Professor of Art at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.
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Steve Ford & David Forlano: "That & This"
McDonald Gallery
October 4, 2025 - November 30, 2025
Our artistic collaboration began in 1984 when we met in Rome during a year abroad program through the Tyler School of Art. Immediately, we were intrigued by some essential differences in our approach to painting, and these distinctions led to heated debates. David created large, abstract paintings, focusing on the richness of surface treatment. Steve’s work, in contrast, addressed the question, “How can I make a painting as an object, a fully integrated three-dimensional piece?” We liked how our differences challenged our individual thinking. To learn from each other, we started trading half-finished drawings and paintings and working both of our ideas into them. This “swapping” has become an essential element of our collaboration. After years of working side by side, David moved to Santa Fe in 2005. We have tables in our Philadelphia studio with half-finished brooches. Steve sends them to David, who develops them further. Other threads from our art-school days continue to be important. While David’s strength has always been to push color, pattern, and surface in new directions, Steve is constantly fascinated by three-dimensional structures and the ways things fit together mechanically. Throughout our collaboration, we have often looked to nature for inspiration. In seed clusters, shell formations, and flower buds, for instance, numerous carefully organized parts, seemingly identical but unique, are arranged beautifully. These exquisite structures led us to new ways of envisioning necklaces, for example, both three-dimensionally and texturally. Many of our brooches are like collections of fragments. Not necessarily of literal fragments, like shards of pottery, but more like conceptual fragments, like a piece of music, a chapter from a story, an ingredient from a cuisine, or an element of a language. At some point, however, we let the references subside and allow the color, abstract patterns, and form to lead us. The work feels complete to us when the balance of elements–abstract and imagistic–comes into focus in some unusual way. At the same time, the viewer is free to gather his/her impression of these suggested images.
The title of the exhibition, That & This, refers to how we make decisions together. We are not intellectuals, not conceptual artists: rather, we make our decisions about our work by choosing between that and this; "I don’t like this, I like that”. The work is finished when we can both agree.
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Ying Larimore: "Shanghai Indiana Fusion"
Shook Gallery
September 13, 2025 - January 11, 2026
Larimore’s work is a vibrant fusion of cultures, techniques, and traditions. Born and raised in Shanghai, China, during a time of political unrest, her early exposure to art came through private lessons before her education was interrupted by years of labor on a communal rice farm. When Chinese universities reopened in 1979, she was accepted into the prestigious School of Art at the University of Shanghai, where she earned her B.A. in Art & Design in 1982. She later worked as an art designer in Shanghai before moving to the United States to pursue an M.A. in Fine Arts at Purdue University, which she received in 1989.
Her artistic vision merges the refined lines and motifs of classical Chinese painting with the expressive color and freedom of Western modernism. A formative visit to the Art Institute of Chicago introduced her to the works of van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, and Pollock—an experience that deeply shaped her practice. As she explains, “Every time I pick up my charcoal or my paintbrush, I am combining the traditions I grew up with and the possibilities I discovered here.”
Based in Indiana for much of her career, Larimore also shared her passion through decades of teaching in local schools and community art programs. Her work has been exhibited in Shanghai, Tokyo, Indianapolis, Chicago, Washington, DC, and throughout Indiana.
Shanghai Indiana Fusion celebrates an artistic journey shaped by resilience, reinvention, and the dynamic blending of East and West.
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