Peter Paul Luce Gallery
The Peter Paul Luce Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located on the campus of Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, IA. Our mission is to provide a platform for students to discover challenging and moving art and connect the Mt. Vernon community to a broader world of contemporary art.
Visiting hours & location
Monday-Friday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Saturday: closed
Sunday: 2 to 4 p.m.
The Peter Paul Luce Gallery is free and open to the public.
McWethy Hall
Cornell College
809 First Street SW
Mt. Vernon, IA
Current Exhibition
Tangled Up in Time
Sandra Louise Dyas
Aug. 26–Oct. 6, 2024
Opening reception: 4–6 p.m., Friday, Aug. 30, 2024
Homecoming reception: 3–5 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 5, 2024
Sandra Louise Dyas' retrospective will show photographs and other lens-based work that Dyas produced over the last four decades of her career as an artist and educator. Her work centers on the theme of what home is and how it shapes us. Dyas has always been deeply interested in trying to understand the relationships formed between people and landscape—how humans develop incredibly deep roots and attachments to the landscape. Dyas' artwork comes out of her own experience as a woman who has lived her entire life in Iowa. This project was supported by The Iowa Arts Council and the NEA.
Upcoming exhibitions
EVERGREEN
Marina Ross
Oct. 21–Nov. 20, 2024
Artist lecture: 3:30 p.m., Friday, Oct. 25, 2024
Opening reception: 4–6 p.m., Friday, Oct. 25, 2024
Marina Ross’ paintings explore the connections between loss, home, and belonging. Ross’ work mines the iconic American movie The Wizard of Oz (1939) as a repository of cultural and personal memory. Ross’ approach to this source material transforms these familiar images into painterly meditations on the shared memory and layered identity of Dorthy.
An Echo and A Hum
Lila Shull and Muriel Condon
Jan. 17–March 2, 2025
Opening reception: 4–6 p.m., Friday, Jan. 17, 2025
Past Exhibitions
Come Celebrate with me..., Nicole Davis
Jan. 22-March 31, 2024
Nicole Davis' work evokes personal, ancestral, and cultural memory as a form of sustenance and resistance in opposition to current societal structures that endeavor to minimize or erase her existence as a Black woman. Working with reclaimed textiles, Davis transforms them—cutting, tearing, assembling, and sewing—to create powerful artworks. These creations embody the past, present, and future, while simultaneously invoking memory, providing commentary, and containing prayers and protection from the violent power structures that dominate society.
Tart Cherry, Emma Beatrez
Oct. 27-Dec. 20, 2023
Drawing on a range of influences including psychoanalysis, contemporary fashion, and human belief systems, Beatrez’s work involves ritual, the recontextualization of materials, and aspects of the body. Her recent paintings and multimedia installations explore core psychoanalytic notions of the symbolic and the real, and the emergence of new meanings through distortion of established iconography. By manipulating the physical data of the gallery with lighting, scent, display, and other interdisciplinary processes, Beatrez hopes to encourage transference of unconscious associations in the viewer.
Echoes and Undercurrents: A Retrospective, Susan M. Coleman
Sept. 1-Oct. 15, 2023
In her retrospective, the former Cornell gallery coordinator and longtime lecturer will show a collection of pastels, collages, drawings, and oil paintings made over the last 35 years. Coleman imbues her landscapes with an awareness of nature as a living presence, embodying source and refuge.
Proximity, Cynthia Grieg
Jan. 27-March. 24, 2023
In “Proximity,” Greig uses photography and video to explore themes of life and death while focusing on how the passage of time between the two has the potential to reveal more than what first meets the eye. “Rendering the poetic rhythms and fleeting forms of a breath exhaled, or reconfiguring the ghostly vestiges of whitewashed still-life arrangements as three-dimensional drawings, my work reduces representation to its most minimal as a way to give visibility to the otherwise unseen or unnoticed,” Greig said. Greig uses different forms of mark-making with photography and video along with 3D work to explore themes of human connection, mortality, and the shifting nature of perception. Produced before the global pandemic, the work took on added significance as forced isolation and political turmoil increased our awareness of the uncertainty of the future.
Study Art at Cornell
Studio Art Art History Pre-Architecture Program Art Community