Fall Exhibition Series - Opening Reception

Event Description

This fall, The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery unveils a powerful trio of exhibitions that weave together memory, materiality, and belonging. Through immersive installations, tactile environments, and poetic encounters, these exhibitions invite visitors to reflect on home, heritage, and the ways art transforms personal histories into collective spaces of care. On View: October 16, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Front Gallery
Lo Que Me Habita (That Which Inhabits Me)
Curated by Sophie Bonet, featuring artist Lisu Vega
Multidisciplinary artist Lisu Vega transforms memory, language, and textile into an architecture of belonging. Drawing from her Wayuu heritage and diasporic archives, Vega’s suspended textiles, oxidized fibers, photographic fragments, and multilingual poems blur the boundaries between body, home, and landscape. Both fragile and generative, the works invite viewers to inhabit memory as a living archive—woven from care, sustainability, and ancestral continuity.

Main Gallery
The Silence That Remains
Curated by Sophie Bonet, featuring artist Sibel Kocabasi
Through heirloom rugs, emergency blankets, and hand-stitched forms, Turkish-born, South Florida–based artist Sibel Kocabasi creates contemplative terrains of resilience and reflection. Her installations shimmer with paradox—fragile yet protective, luminous yet quiet—transforming materials of survival into sanctuaries of peace. Inviting stillness over confrontation, Kocabasi’s work asks how we carry home within us and how acts of care can transform crisis into continuity.

Aisles Gallery & Third Space
Our Loving World
Organized by The Frank’s Education Department, featuring the artwork of Stephanie McMillan
Ft. Lauderdale native Stephanie McMillan brings joy and color to the gallery with playful works that “cute-ify” South Florida’s plants and animals. Anthropomorphized flora and fauna—with bright faces and cartoon charm—celebrate the region’s edible and medicinal species, offering a whimsical lens for audiences of all ages to rediscover their environment.

Visit our website for Gallery hours and more information: https://www.thefrankgallery.org