Art that turns INward
Photo: Lake Ann-based artist Cherie Correll stands with her mixed media piece “Underground Upside Down.”
By Katie Dunn
Sun contributor
Winter in Leelanau County draws life inward. In a place so deeply defined by outwardness—by land, water, and expanse—the shift, nevertheless, feels instinctive, even necessary. The season arrives not only as weather, but as a kind of inversion, reshaping both landscape and psychology.
Which makes the Glen Arbor Art Center’s (GAAC) first exhibition of 2026, INteriors, so timely and so entirely relevant.
The concept for INteriors was developed by Sarah Bearup-Neal, gallery manager of GAAC, whose curatorial instincts invariably have a way of calibrating exhibitions with the emotional temperature of the season. Ever the wizard behind GAAC’s most resonant ideas, Bearup-Neal had been pondering winter itself: what happens when cold and darkness bends attention toward introspection, and how that shift might be reflected, challenged, and expanded through the arts.
“Because winter was on the horizon, which is a signal to hunker down in one’s cave, I wondered how many different ways one could pull on the concept of ‘interior.’ And, as it turns out, there are many interiors to explore. There’s the go-to interior created by a building…Then there’s the interior space between a person’s two ears,” Bearup-Neal explains.
In framing the call for work, Bearup-Neal intentionally left the idea of INteriors open and elastic, welcoming the familiar language of rooms and walls, while also inviting artists to venture further inward. The result is an exhibition that moves fluidly between physical space and states of mind, where conceptual approaches feel especially generative without eclipsing the power of the rendered room.
The opening reception on Jan. 9 unfolded as a warm counterpart to the cold outside. On one of winter’s shortest days, GAAC was a haven for conversation and curiosity—filled with the low, steady hum of engagement. Attendees lingered in the gallery, circling back to works, exchanging impressions, settling into a slower, more deliberate rhythm of observation.
Upon entering the gallery that evening, the energy was immediate. And the very first piece to draw me in was Beulah-based artist Jessica Kovan’s Screaming Inside. I thought at once: is Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), one of the defining figures of Abstract Expressionism, somehow here? Because this particular work by Kovan, deliberately or not, unmistakably harkens to his genius.
Familiar and reliable supporters of the arts were in attendance, including Georgia Gietzen; Rita and Bill Witler; Sandy and Don Miller; Peg McCarty; Mary MacDonald; Beth Bricker; Page Stoutland; Carol Hohle; Angela Saxon and Royce Deans; Tom Krause; and Christine Deucher, among others. The evening stood as a celebration of a creative ecosystem shaped by regional artists and the community that sustains them.
Laura Cavender, Glen Arborite and avowed aesthete, was also in attendance. In her immediate impressions, she spoke less about any single piece than about the collective impact of the work and the vitality of the local creative community.
“I remember reading Sarah Bearup-Neil’s artist call for this particular show. Immediately it woke my mind with all sorts of ideas…so it’s especially impactful to walk through and see how this has been answered by the artists. We get to live in this community of people who create art—pieces from Maple City, Cedar, Traverse City, and here in Glen Arbor. Creating art takes imagination, but also action and follow-through. I’m really proud to live in a community of people who have all three,” Cavender shares.
Interiors features work by 27 exhibitors, encompassing 34 objects in both two- and three-dimensional formats. The exhibition spans a wide range of media—including collage, digital photography, drawing, found materials, ink, mixed media, painting, paper cutting, and sculpture—all reflecting the richness of the concept itself.
Awards
Best of Show was awarded to Gail Hunter of Beulah for Time to Go, a piece that exemplifies the exhibition’s cerebral ambitions. Her acrylic-on-canvas work distills the moment of departure into simple yet evocative imagery: a suitcase and two boxes sit in an open doorway, with a key left hanging on a hook—its meaning deliberately ambiguous. The composition is spare and meticulously rendered, each element carefully chosen to invite reflection.
As Hunter reflects, “Time to go. When your space no longer has a purpose, when your space no longer supports you mentally, physically, or emotionally…time to make a big change. When you know something or someone is just not working…hopefully we’ll consider any situation that may not be working for him or her, and realize it’s time to move on.”
The Marjory Sonner Hughes Award for Creative Excellence (made possible by Margo Burian) was awarded to Lake Ann-based artist Cherie Correll for her mixed media piece Underground Upside Down.
One of two merit awards (made possible by the Barbara and Victor Klein Fund) went to Corrina Ulrich of Cedar for her ink wash collage Before Us. The other merit award was presented to Traverse City-based artist Jan Johnson Doerfer for her acrylic, ink and paint work Outside In.
The Couldn’t Be Ignored Award, a special recognition created by GAAC for work that defies conventional categories, went to Kovan for her mixed media piece Screaming Inside.
Kovan drew inspiration for Screaming Inside from a deeply resonant moment when her teenage daughter donated 12 inches of her hair to Locks of Love. Emerging from the salon with a stoic demeanor, her daughter simply said: “I’m crying inside.” That sentiment—a raw, universal expression of hidden emotion—stayed with Kovan and became the seed for her work.
Kovan shares: “Daily I work to hold grace and beauty together in the midst of this complicated world. Yet, if asked, I would respond: ‘I’m screaming inside.’”
She channels this notion of inner turmoil—frustration and quiet anguish—into her practice as an artist and advocate for the environment, engaging with vulnerability on both a personal and communal level. In Screaming Inside, a shadowed figure embodies these hidden emotions. The work became a collaborative experience during a climate-change art journaling workshop led by Kovan, where participants were invited to contribute words directly onto the rendered figure. Inscribed sentiments on Screaming Inside range from overwhelmed and fear to love, help, and horrified. Through this layering of voices, Kovan transforms personal struggle into a shared dialogue, bridging the private and the universal, and demonstrating how beauty, grace, and internal conflict can coexist.
Other Notable Submissions
One of the most unexpected voices in the exhibition was that of Michele Aucello, an acclaimed nighttime sky photographer whose work chasing the northern lights has captivated audiences far beyond northern Michigan. Her contribution to INteriors proves that even an artist known for vast landscapes and celestial panoramas can create intimate, arresting reflections on personal space.
Aucello’s piece, Tiny World, began as part of a larger night-photography process. Using a 360º camera, she selected a single frame and “curled it in and around itself in Photoshop to create what is known as a tiny planet.” As a landscape photographer, she approached INteriors by asking how exterior spaces might become interior ones, capturing “something vast in a small, contained space.” Taken in a field by D.H. Day Barn on a cold winter night, the image was transformed into a cozy, self-contained interior.
As Aucello explains, “Because I am a landscape photographer, I had to apply that notion to the great outdoors…Can the outside become the inside? I’d say so.”
One of Leelanau’s most venerated artists, Mark Mehaffey of Empire, approaches the idea of interior not as a space one enters, but as a condition one carries. His work, Windows, is grounded in attention—to emotional weather, and to what is quietly revealed.
Windows consists of a centered pair of eyes, isolated against a neutral field. One eye bears a single falling tear, emphasizing restraint and vulnerability over overt drama. Rendered as a transparent watercolor on Yupo, the eyes act as portals to the interior self. Inspired by someone deeply cherished by the artist, the gaze holds sadness and lived experience without spectacle.
“I thought the eyes represented our interiors … often hidden, sometimes masked, occasionally readable,” Mehaffey explains. “The eyes are both a reflection of what is seen and a window into the interior of ourselves. They allow others to peer into our hearts and reveal what is not said.”
Bill Allen, based in Maple City and widely known for his welded steel animal sculptures, engages the exhibition’s theme from a markedly different—and deliberately playful—direction. In contrast to the precision and structure of his metal work, Allen explored a more instinctive mixed-media practice, favoring spontaneity, color, and process over premeditation.
“By Playing Inside, I’m referring to playing with various materials and letting the process show the way,” Allen shared, describing the title of his work, which exemplifies his improvisational approach. Composed of watercolor, paper, ink, marker, charcoal, spray paint, acrylic print, and sand on a wood panel, Playing Inside functions less as a fixed destination than as a visible record of creative motion.
These artists represent just a portion of the work on view in INteriors, an exhibition highlighting the remarkable range and vitality of interior space as an artistic subject. It makes clear the interior is not a minor motif, but a powerful genre—one that has occupied artists for centuries.
Art History: Interiors Across the Centuries
In the 17th century, Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), one of the most distinguished painters of the Dutch Golden Age, elevated the domestic interior into a site of meticulous observation and quiet contemplation.
With The Art of Painting (1668), Vermeer depicts a sunlit workspace rendered in extraordinary detail. A solitary artist turns away from the viewer—absorbed in his creative labor—while maps, fabrics, and furnishings are arranged with measured precision. A second figure stands near the window, a woman traditionally interpreted as Clio, the Muse of History, identified by her laurel wreath, trumpet, and book—reminding us that even the quietest domestic interiors can carry profound symbolic and cultural meaning.
More than two centuries later, Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), one of the most inventive Surrealists of the 20th century, carried the interior fully into the realm of the mind. While best known for The Persistence of Memory (1931), his oil painting The Ghost of Vermeer of Delft Which Can Be Used as a Table (1934) offers a direct, reverent homage to Vermeer’s The Art of Painting.
Where Vermeer’s interior is grounded in careful observation, Dalí’s is filtered through Surrealist logic: furniture becomes anatomy, forms melt and fuse in biomorphic ways, and space behaves unpredictably. Familiar shapes are warped, stretched, and reimagined, producing a disorienting yet fascinating interplay of reality and imagination. Still, the connection between the two artists is decidedly unmistakable.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) expanded the interior into a space of sensory exploration. His densely patterned rooms blur boundaries between figure and environment, creating interiors saturated with memory and intimacy. Works such as Interior with Flowers (1919) and Interior at the Balcony (1919) exemplify his fascination with how light, color, and objects can transform a room into an interior reimagined through paint, where the arrangement of objects and the shimmer of color take center stage.
Any conversation about interiors in modern art inevitably turns to Henri Matisse (1869-1954). The Red Studio (1911), housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and its companion piece, The Pink Studio (1911), held in Russia at the Pushkin Museum, remain among the most influential meditations on interior space ever painted. Though separated by geography, the two works operate in tandem, each exploring the interplay of color, space, and personal environment in complementary ways.
A pivotal figure of American Realism, Edward Hopper (1882-1967) likewise is closely associated with interior scenes shaped by solitude, introspection, and emotional restraint. In works such as Nighthawks (1942), Hopper depicts spaces that feel spare and deliberate. These interiors are not decorative backdrops but psychologically charged environments, often marked by silence, stillness, and a subtle tension between figure and space.
Conversely, David Hockney’s (b. 1937) interiors radiate a very different energy from Hopper’s. A British painter who spent formative years in Los Angeles, Hockney absorbed the effects of sunlight, color, and the clarity of California light, and these qualities transformed his approach to interior space. In his painting, Looking at Pictures on a Screen (1977), a figure studies reproductions of artworks in a bright, colorful studio, showing how interiors can become active sites of engagement and reflection.
From Vermeer’s quietly observed rooms to Hockney’s sunlit, playful spaces, the arts remind us that interiors are more than physical settings. They are mirrors of perception, emotion, and imagination. GAAC’s INteriors carries this legacy forward, inviting viewers to step beyond their own rooms and experience the many ways interior life can be expressed, imagined, and shared.
On view through March 12, INteriors arrives at the very moment we are most inclined to turn inward. But rather than huddling in our personal interiors, GAAC offers a reprieve—a chance to escape the familiar and step into the interiors of others.
