Peter Paul Luce Gallery

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

Edens and End Times

James Ostrander
August 29 - October 12, 2025
OOpening Reception: Friday August 29, 4-6 p.m.
Homecoming Reception: Saturday, October 11,  3-5 p.m.

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.

In the end, I just miss the before

Stevie Haley Delgado
October 24 - December 7, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday October 24, 4-6 p.m.

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.

An Echo and A Hum, Lila Shull and Muriel Condon

January 17–March 2, 2025

Lila Shull and Muriel Condon use prints, drawings, ceramics, paper pulp sculptures, and quilts to examine memory and how objects reflect time. Their collaborative practice began with an oversized textile book project that used tongue-in-cheek compositions to achieve a sense of play and scrappiness. After finding ease and joy in working together, they continued their investigation on how material meaning and intentional color relationships can charge the work. As a collaborative pair they communicate, nurture, and evolve - grounded in the tactility and history of craft processes.

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.