Bicentennial: Regionally Related Works from the Permanent Collection

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.

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.

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.