Exhibits

Bachman Gallery
1040 Ridge Road, Munster, IN

My America - South Shore Arts 83rd Annual Salon Show

June 19 - August 15, 2025

Evening of Artist Micro Talks: Thursday July 16, 7-8pm

Awards Presentation: Sunday, August 2, 1-3pm

With My America, South Shore Arts inaugurates its first themed Salon Show by inviting artists to articulate what, after 250 years of experimentation, successes, tragedies, and upheaval, America means to them.

The possessive in the exhibition's title is significant. It acknowledges that identity is situated, that belonging can be fraught, and that citizenship is as much felt as it is codified. To define My America one must reveal something of oneself: one's inheritances, allegiances, disappointments, and hopes. In this sense, the exhibition becomes less a survey of national sentiment than a portrait of plural selves.

 This juried exhibition brings together more than sixty works spanning a wide range of media, reflecting the diversity of artistic voices that make up our contemporary cultural landscape. Selected by jurors Elsa Munoz and William Blake, the exhibition embraces the salon tradition of multiplicity and dialogue, presenting artworks that engage its theme from vastly different perspectives. Some artists offer sweeping political statements that confront the nation's past, present, and future, while others turn inward, creating intimate vignettes of family, community, memory, and everyday life. Together, these works reveal that there is no singular vision of America, only a constellation of experiences, a democratic sprawl. The exhibition suggests that a nation, like a work of art, is never singular in meaning; it is assembled and reassembled by those who claim it.

 In gathering these varied responses under one roof, South Shore Arts offers the community a space where commemoration gives way to conversation, where differing visions coexist in productive tension, and where the question of America remains, deliberately and meaningfully, unanswered.

Atrium GallerY
1040 Ridge Road, Munster, IN

Stillness & Spirit: Paintings by Jane Cowley

May 22 - June 28, 2026
Artist Reception: Thursday, June 18, 6–8PM

Stillness & Spirit: Paintings by Jane Cowley gathers more than twenty oil paintings that resist the contemporary appetite for spectacle. In portraits, landscapes, and still lifes alike, Cowley’s attention settles not on drama but on duration: a face held in thought, a forest vista at twilight, a bowl of pears absorbing the last pale light of afternoon. Based in Michigan City, Cowley paints with a restrained sensibility that recalls the pleasure of simply looking long enough for ordinary things to become quietly luminous. Her subjects are not arranged into grandeur; rather, they are granted the dignity of unhurried observation.

What emerges across the exhibition is a belief that stillness is not emptiness but presence. The portraits carry an almost devotional calm, while the landscapes seem suspended between weather and memory. Even the still lifes, those time honored exercises in painterly patience, feel less composed than encountered, as though the artist had paused beside them and waited for their character to reveal itself. Running from May 22 through June 28, 2026, the exhibition offers a rare invitation: to slow one’s gaze until spirit, almost imperceptibly, comes into view. An artist’s reception with Jane Cowley will be held on June 18 from 6–8 PM alongside the preview reception for the 83rd Annual Salon Show – My America.

Sponsored by

In Memory of Ugo Arrighi
Major & DenisE Dillard 

ARE YOU AN ARTIST?

More than 15 exhibitions fill four South Shore Arts galleries each year, showcasing regional, national and international artists and cultures. If you are an artist interested in exhibiting with South Shore Arts, submit your exhibit proposal here or contact Brandon Johnson, Gallery Coordinator, at Brandon@southshoreartsonline.org

SPONSOR AN EXHIBIT!

Advertise Your Business While Supporting the Arts.
Exhibit sponsors receive:
• logo and credit line on signage at exhibit
• logo and/or credit line in publicity and promotion
• opportunities for corporate entertaining throughout the exhibit

Contact Sandie Phalen, Director of Marketing and Development
219/836.1839, ext.101
 

© All images are copyrighted by the respective artists.