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
Statements for Small Screens
Lorelei d'Andriole
January 16 - March 1, 2025
Opening reception: Friday, January 16, 4-6 p.m.
Artist talk: Friday, Januar 16, 3:30 p.m.
Lorelei d’Andriole is an artist, educator and writer whose work is at the intersections of intermedia and transgender studies. Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, d’Andriole toured across the country in punk bands and played hundreds of shows in venues ranging from house shows to amphitheaters. d’Andriole earned her BFA in New Media from the University of Central Oklahoma (Magna Cum Laude) in 2018 and immediately went on to earn her MA and MFA with honors from the University of Iowa’s Intermedia program.
She has shown work nationally at universities, galleries, festivals and DIY spaces including sUgAR Gallery (Arkansas), University of Nevada – Las Vegas (Nevada), and Public Space One’s Open Air Media Festival (Iowa). As a production director for KRUI 89.7 FM, d’Andriole hosted an experimental radio art program where she did weekly broadcasts for three years between 2018-2021. In 2022, d’Andriole completed a visual arts fellowship at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in New York City, NY and currently works as an Assistant Professor in Electronic Art and Intermedia at Michigan State University.
d’Andriole has been an active musician in the US punk scene since childhood and is currently playing in the Michigan bands Pet Me and Danger Cat. d’Andriole has worked collaboratively as part of the artist duos HOLO (with artist Kelly Clare) and Wetware Instruments (with artist Abhishek Narula). d’Andriole served as a board member for the International Alliance for Women in Music where she advocated for queer and trans* composers and musicians between 2022-2024. She has completed artist residencies at Signal Culture in Loveland CO, Wave Farm in Acra NY, and the Institute for Electronic Art at Alfred University in Alfred NY.
Upcoming exhibitions
Spring Senior Thesis Exhibition #1
March 29- April 8, 2026
Opening reception: Sunday, March 29, 2–4 p.m.
Spring Senior Thesis Exhibition #2
Apr. 19-29, 2026
Opening reception: Sunday, Apr. 19, 2026, 2–4 p.m.
The Luce Gallery’s programming for the 2026-27 academic year will be announced in April of 2026.
Past exhibitions
In the end, I just miss the before, Stevie Haley Delgado
October 24–December 7, 2025
Stevie Haley Delgado builds transitory worlds through papier-mâché sculpture, constructed cardboard spaces, and the interplay of light and shadow, creating atmospheric environments that invite exploration, curiosity, and reflection. This work explores the complexity of childhood wonder when muddled with grief, tragedy, and a decaying sense of self. Central to this practice are echoes of her lived experiences—particularly the fleeting nature of young queer relationships and the tragedy that can often surround them.
Edends and End Times, James Ostrander
August 29–October 12, 2025
In figurative paintings that parody the artist’s own life, James Ostrander finds humor and sorrow in human bad behavior, pain and absurdity in embodiment, and shame in complicity with a cultural inheritance that has privileged some through the exclusion of others. Caught between an inheritance of impossible ideals and material realities, his painterly avatar “Orstranger” struggles through would-be Edenic suburb-scapes, laid low by an unyielding cast of flora, fauna, and environmental waste.
EVERGREEN, Marina Ross
Oct. 21-Nov. 20, 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 an 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.
Tangled Up in Time, Sandra Louis Dyas
Aug. 26-Oct. 6, 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 my 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.
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