Opening Night Reception: Fri, October 9, 2026 | 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Exhibition Dates: October 9, 2026 – November 14, 2026
Special Gallery Hours Wed-Sat, 10:00 AM – 2:00 PM or by Appt.
Free Admission: RSVP for the Opening Night
Bedroom Communities: Journeys Inside and Outside the Establishment brings together artists whose creative practices have developed along distinctly different paths. Some have exhibited in galleries, art centers, and group exhibitions, while others have worked more privately or moved in and out of public view. Personal choices, careers, family responsibilities, access, and circumstance have shaped their experiences, yet each has maintained a sustained commitment to making art. The exhibition considers how an artist’s practice can evolve and endure without following a conventional trajectory toward visibility and recognition.
Exhibiting Artists:
Marina Alcantara is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, video, performance, writing, assemblage, and found objects. Growing up between Brasil, Colombia, Argentina, and the United States has shaped a perspective rooted in continual observation and discovery. Her practice extends beyond conventional exhibition spaces, finding artistic possibility in ordinary objects, experiences, and places.
Becky Coleman followed a path to full-time art that developed alongside a career in education. After earning a BA and later an MA in special education, she taught public school for eight years before moving from Chicago to Sarasota to devote herself to her studio practice. Drawing from relationships and landscape, her work reflects the experience of an artist whose professional identity emerged through a gradual journey rather than a traditional gallery-centered career.
John Fraunfelter/John Fraun is a Sarasota-based artist creating vibrant digital portraits informed by queer experience, drag, and internet aesthetics. His Creature series explores desire, otherness, and the tension between the alluring and grotesque through figures that hover between human and alien. Working digitally allows his practice to develop naturally beyond traditional gallery structures and reflects the expanding spaces in which contemporary artists create and present their work.
Joan Lyon has sustained a wide-ranging professional practice across painting, sculpture, collage, printmaking, and mixed-media monotype, exhibiting in galleries, juried exhibitions, and solo shows throughout her career. Despite decades of dedicated studio work and a substantial exhibition record, her art has not received the broader recognition that the depth and longevity of her practice merit. Driven by ideas and social commentary, her work explores vulnerability, endurance, and humanity’s relationship with the natural world, reflecting the experience of accomplished artists who can remain underrecognized within the larger art world.
Jessica Mowery came to her art practice through a 15-year career in interior design, an experience that continues to shape how she thinks about space and composition. Influenced by floor plans, landscapes, and topography, her work often takes an aerial perspective and becomes a way of organizing thoughts, emotions, and competing demands. Her journey demonstrates how a serious creative practice can develop through another profession and outside the conventional path of the exhibiting artist.
Dottie Petrilak has developed her practice through sustained experimentation and an openness to unexpected sources of inspiration. The series presented in Bedroom Communities draws from the directness and spontaneity of children’s art, with each work originating from a group of related words and ideas. Using a process of palimpsest, she builds, obscures, and reworks layers of imagery and meaning, allowing traces of earlier decisions to remain visible within the finished work.
Chloe Rusek graduated from New College of Florida, where her thesis film centered on the campus production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Her creative interests extend across film, jewelry, makeup, and hair, crossing boundaries between fine art, personal expression, and everyday making. Her path reflects how meaningful creative practices can develop in many forms and in spaces outside the traditional gallery system.
Andrea Tobin took an unconventional path after graduating from Columbia, combining art and fashion by founding a handbag company using her own large-scale abstract paintings. Cutting apart finished canvases and transforming them into functional objects introduced an idea that would eventually bring her back to the studio with a different perspective. By dismantling and reconstructing her paintings into tactile compositions, her journey demonstrates how an artistic practice can move outside the gallery context, transform through other experiences, and reemerge in a new form.
Rosa Valladares began her artistic education in Peru, earning a BA in Printmaking and Drawing before completing an MFA at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Rather than remaining within traditional printmaking, she has expanded the medium into three-dimensional installations incorporating metal, clay, fabric, and bookmaking. Her journey demonstrates how a rigorous studio practice can move beyond established categories and conventional forms of presentation while continuing to evolve.