Brenau University Galleries

What can we say? Our Alumni truly are the best of the best! We are still buzzing from the energy of this year’s Alumni Juried Exhibition. To everyone who submitted their work: thank you for sharing your vision and continuing the legacy of creativity at our institution.

A huge thank you also goes out to our wonderful community who came out to support these artists and celebrate the power of visual storytelling.

Please join us in congratulating this year`s standout award winners:

 Best in Show: Jennifer Griner, Held in Mourning (Pearl High School, Mississippi, 1997)

 Best in Photography: Heather R. Hanline, Cortile

 Best in Painting: Shiloh Van Gray, Ordinary Contradictions: The Unkempt Hairdresser

 Best in Mixed Media: Veronica Martin, Solitude

 Honorable Mention: Jennifer Lynch Shull, Journey of Life

Thank you to everyone who attended the opening of Josue Morales Urbina`s "Interstices!" We are honored to host this exhibit in the Leo Castelli gallery through April 2026. Stop by to see the incredible work!

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Josue Morales Urbina’s solo exhibition, “Interstices,” will be on view in Brenau’s Leo Castelli Gallery from Jan. 22 through April 2026. Join us Jan. 22, from 4:30-6:30 p.m. for the opening reception and artist talk.

Morales Urbina was born in Guatemala and has lived throughout the United States since his 20s, yet he has never felt that he fully belongs in either place. In the United States, Morales Urbina is asked about his origins. Within Latin American communities, he remains a minority within a minority. When he returns to Guatemala, his accent, his clothing, and his lived experience mark him as different, someone who seems to belong but does not. Art becomes the place where he builds a sense of home.

Foreignness and the impermanence of memory shape the installations he creates, which emerge from fragments of lived experience and materials that evoke the familiar, the perishable, and the intimate. Informed by Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the Third Space, his practice explores the in-between condition where identity is negotiated, and hybridity becomes both tension and creation. Process-oriented and meditative, his Third Culture Kid work discovers yet another Third Space through repetition, where hand and mind converge and the act of making becomes a site of belonging.

Morales Urbina gives everyday materials a sense of protagonism, allowing them to shape the work through their own tensions, fragilities, and transformations. He uses edible and biodegradable elements such as honey, milk, mandarin peels, baguettes, coffee, and plantain chips. These materials carry domestic associations and cultural histories, and within his installations, they also seek to adjust to the newly created environment, mimicking his interest in displacement and adaptation. A memory evokes a material, and the material guides the work.

Through proxemics – the language of personal space – he also treats the viewer as a material, shaping the work through their presence and movement. These environments offer a quiet home for those who live between identities, a home that speaks in many materials, many tongues. A home that disappears but is never truly gone.

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