Munroe Family Community Gallery

January 15 - March 20, 2021
This exhibition will feature some of Dean Gioia’s most recent work. The Tallahassee based artist has devoted 5 decades to interpreting the southern landscape and turning it into fine art. His focus on light and how it plays over the nooks and crannies of everyday life results in sumptuous paintings filled with an ethereal presence. The work finds its way into the human psyche, awakening memory, preserving moments and places seemingly frozen in time. Dean Gioia has exhibited widely in the Southeast, is a Florida Fellowship recipient and his work is in hundreds of public and private collections including the Florida Museum of Natural History and Science, IBM, Barnett Bank, Florida State University, and the City of Tallahassee.

Fall 2021

The drive to create can be undeniable, even in a place as bleak, depressing, and dangerous as a prison. Creativity in an Uncreative Place showcases artwork made by inmates in Florida prisons, drawing from the collection of David Gussak, Ph.D., ATF-BC, Professor for Florida State University Graduate Art Therapy program. The bulk of the collection is comprised of the unique paintings by “Candy Man,” an inmate who paints with brushes made from locks of his own hair, and creates his own pigments from the colored dye of M&M candies. Other artists in the exhibition used shoe polish, trash bags, cardboard, and other found objects to make their contraband works of art. Gussak’s stresses that “as long as there has been incarceration, there has been art. Prisons are filled with creative energy needing an outlet.”