Galleries

Color Wheel 4 • 2024 • gouache and ink on paper • 14” x 14”

January 28–February 8, 2025

Reception for the artist January 28, 2025, 5:00–6:30 pm

Artist Bio: 

Luci Kahroniios’tha Evans is an American contemporary painter and mixed media artist based in St. Louis, Missouri.

Raised in a family of artists, Luci’s passion for creativity began at a young age. Her artistic journey includes attending a Drawing Marathon led by Graham Nickson at the New York Studio School in 2018 and an art study abroad traveling through Greece, Italy, and Turkey that same year. She earned a BA in Studio Art from Principia College in 2020.

Her work has been featured in several exhibitions, including the pop-up show Tracking the Curve at the New York Studio School Student Gallery (2018). At Principia College’s James K. Schmidt Gallery, her art appeared in two exhibitions: a Student Study Abroad Show (2018), which she also co-curated, and a Juried Student Art Show(2019), where she received a prize for her work. Additionally, she was honored with the Kathryn Cogswell Maule Studio Art Award during her junior year (2019).

Artist Statement:
Corn has always been a significant symbol in my life. Growing up in the Midwest—the heart of the Corn Belt—we are surrounded by fields of it. Corn is in what we eat, what we drink, even in the gas we put in our cars. But what I am most drawn to about this crop is its role in Indigenous people’s histories and cultures. For example,I’m inspired by the Mohawk legend of the Three Sisters, which teaches the traditional practice of planting corn, beans, and squash together in the same garden. Each individual plant biologically supports the growth and wellbeing of the others and together they provide a healthy balanced diet for the humans who plant them. This practical form of companion planting symbolizes the harmony between food, land, and community.

As a descendant of the Mohawk Tribe, I strive in my work to celebrate the revival of Indigenous knowledge and traditions while grappling with the impacts of colonization. The works in this exhibition encourage you to explore the complicated story of corn: as a sacred crop and as a symbol of industrial exploitation.

My creative practice is rooted in experimentation and exploration, blending familiar and new materials to examine themes of identity, resilience, and environmental sustainability. I often use encaustic paint, a medium introduced to me by my Mohawk grandmother. I love working with this natural material (paint made from bee’s wax, damar resin and pigments) for its connection to my personal memory, its tactile qualities and its associations with preservation and healing which relates to broader cultural narratives.

Through mixed-media techniques, including painting, sculpture, and installation, I transform corn crop residue into textured assemblages. Each cob becomes part of a larger whole, reflecting the interconnectedness of individual lives within broader systems. The repetitive, meditative nature of this process speaks to cycles of life, culture, and regeneration, even in the face of destruction. Color also plays a vital role in my work, serving as both an intuitive and symbolic element. Vibrant hues evoke vitality, resilience, and the potential for transformation. 

Through my art, I aim to create a space where viewers can reflect on the past, honor Indigenous wisdom, and imagine a more sustainable and inclusive future.

Let Them Eat Cake, I, (2023), acrylic and gouache paint on poster paper, 18”x24”  

October 29 – November 23

Opening reception: Tuesday, October 29, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Artist’s Gallery Talk: 5:30 p.m.

Élan Cadiz is an interdisciplinary, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, North American, native New Yorker, and visual artist who deconstructs and balances her intersectionality through her creative projects. Élan’s art and practice are grounded in the documentation of her personal narrative through the use of portraiture, domestic and historical imagery.

Cadiz’s artworks explore the ways societal and personal histories overlap and affect individual relationships, power dynamics and identity. The materials she works with are influenced by the subjects she discuss which is why she moves skillfully through mediums, combining and collaging the best materials to convey her visual language.

Cadiz’s intention is to speak to the boundless potential in humanity and ways our pasts can inform our future for the better, despite impediments that arise. Her goal is to have viewers question their condition(s) in ways that bring about helpful inner inquiry and thoughtful discussion.

About the Artist

Élan Cadiz’s formal training began in the High School of Art & Design, New York City. After graduation she was accepted to the Fashion Institute of Technology where she studied Advertisement and Design and Photography for two years. Cadiz graduated from City College of New York City with a BA in Studio Art and Education in 2008. Cadiz received her Master’s in Fine Art (MFA) from the School of Visual Arts May 2018 and received the Martha Trevor Award/ Worldstudio AIGA Scholarship, Paula Rhodes Memorial Award and the School of Visual Arts Merit Scholarship.

Since 2014 Cadiz has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions and she has been engaged in numerous artist residencies.

Cadiz has instructed young people in the arts for 24 years and taught for or was in collaboration with programs/institutions such as the Harlem School of the Arts, Thurgood Marshall Upper and Lower Academies, Harlem Children Zone, No Longer Empty, Cool Culture, Bank Street College, Weeksville Heritage Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York Historical Society, Center for Arts Education, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the Boys Club of New York City, Foster Pride, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan and the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, Bridgehampton Museum and more.

April 23  – May 11, 2024

Opening reception: Tuesday, April 23, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.

April 9 – 18, 2024

Opening reception: Tuesday, April 9, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Juror: artist and art professor Eric Shultis
Juror’s talk:  Tuesday, April 9, 5:30 p.m.

February 27 – March 30, 2024

Opening reception: Tuesday, February 27, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Artist’s Gallery Talk: Tuesday, February 27, 5:30 p.m.

My process has employed a variety of images, forms, surfaces, methods, and materials to explore an imaginative space in which contrasts and contradictions coexist to encourage a multitude of associations.  Available Providence brings together two generations of my work — pairing earlier sculptures with new mixed media works on drafting film — that emphasize intersections of the human-constructed environment and our conceptions of the natural world.

Pearl, 1998, Styrofoam, fiberglass, resin, acrylic interference paint, 52″ x 21″

In the mid-1990’s, with the support of my university and a residency in the ArtPace International Artist in Residence program, I was able to enlist fabricators to translate my drawn images into physical objects, designed to resemble manufactured or naturally occurring fodrms that suggest notions of containment and hidden or absent actions. Subsequently, I re-engaged with my original painting/drawing practice, arriving at its current incarnation in the Drift Threshold series. Here, painting, drawing, and collage are combined to exploit the translucent, two-sided substrate on which images related to transitory phenomena (such as aerial landscapes, clouds, and patterns in ocean foam and butterfly wings) are layered and “carved” into each other.  These contingent and shifting perspectives inevitably become explicit and metaphorical references to our larger, shared concerns of partitioning, erosion, instability, water, and weather.

Pictured above: Drift Threshold (study 1), 2023, Acrylic paint, acrylic ink, colored pencil, leather on drafting film, 11.25″ x 9″

February 6 – 17, 2024

Opening reception: Tuesday, February 6, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
5:30 p.m.: Q+A with the Prague Abroad students

Public Reading of Creative Writing completed on the Fall 2023 Prague Abroad:  Tuesday, February 13, 7:30 p.m.  In the Schmidt Gallery.

October 31 – December 8, 2023

Windows 1, 2022, oil on canvas on panel, 30″ x 30″ (above)

Nancy Newman Rice was born in New York City and was educated at Cornell University (BFA with honors) and at Washington University (MFA). She has received awards that include a National Endowment for the Arts/MMA Fellowship for painting, Artist’s Residency Award at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France, and nominations for a Tiffany Award and an AVA Award in the Visual Arts. Newman Rice has exhibited her work internationally and has had solo exhibitions in both galleries and museums. Her work is included in public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad. Newman Rice has also written articles and reviews for national arts magazines including The New Art Examiner, American Craft, and The St. Louis Post Dispatch, as well as catalog essays for artists’ exhibitions. She took early retirement from Maryville University, St. Louis MO, where she taught painting for 34 years and was the director of Studio Art.

Website: www.nancynewmanrice.com

September 12 – October 21, 2023

Opening reception: Tuesday, September 12, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Special Homecoming reception: Friday, October 13, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.

Dan Kistler is a visual media artist living and working in southern Illinois.  His pathway in art includes an undergraduate degree in studio art from Principia College, two-years of classes at The Center for Creative Studies, a decade of work as an illustrator in the Detroit market, an MA in drawing from Webster University, and 27 years of teaching art at Principia College.  Kistler’s current work is taking a number of directions. In photography he has stepped back into the darkroom and has fallen in love all over again with film photography—the grain, the anticipation, the unexpected results, and the touch it takes to get an image worth working with.