Current Exhibitions

In May Your Life Be Easy, Samantha Modder combines allegory and fairytale to explore aspiration, power, and interlocking systems of oppression through larger-than-life, digitally altered ballpoint-pen drawings of Black women. Drawing its title from a blessing once offered to her mother by a Nigerian village elder, the exhibition reflects on the complications of being a person from the imagined Global South pursuing the promises of an equally imagined Global North. Inspired by masquerade and Orisha dancers from the Yoruba tradition, Modder creates lively, kinetic scenes that use an enchanting, storybook aesthetic to dissect privilege and the hard truths of a capitalist reality.

Modder is a Nigerian-Sri Lankan artist born in Lagos and raised in Sri Lanka who currently lives and works in Tampa. She graduated from Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, in 2017 with a BA in Studio Art and Engineering, and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, MO, in 2022.

Flock presents a visual exploration of identity, resilience, transformation, and migration through the work of Bahamian-born artist Omar Richardson, Art Instructor at Hillsborough College. Rooted in the cultural symbols, oral traditions, and spiritual heritage of the Bahamas, Richardson’s practice blends traditional Caribbean visual language with contemporary mark-making. Now based in Tampa, he finds renewed inspiration in the historic and multicultural neighborhood of Ybor City, a setting that echoes themes of migration, resistance, and creative endurance. His woodcuts and prints embody emotional narratives that bridge past and present, homeland and adopted home.

This exhibition also features prints made by three current and former students—Daniel Del Valle, Sofia Braswell, and Eliza Rivera—whose contributions reflect mentorship, dialogue, and artistic growth. Together, the artists invite viewers to reflect on how place, memory, and community shape evolving identities and the collective journey of becoming.

September 4, 2025-February 1, 2026

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 4, 6-8 p.m.

Pérez’s striking series of urban landscapes pays tribute to the immigrants who built the “Cigar Capital of the World” and to the architecture that holds the city’s memory. Created with mixed media on unique surfaces, including salvaged doors from homes impacted by the 2024 hurricane, his work invites viewers to step through a symbolic gateway of resilience, history, and cultural restoration.

Mario Javier Pérez Salabarría is a Cuban-born artist and writer who came to the United States in 2004. With a background in architecture and art teaching in Cuba, and later a master’s in guidance counseling in the U.S., Pérez has built a career that bridges art, education, and community. Currently serving as an Assistant Dean at Hillsborough Community College while pursuing his doctorate in education at USF, he continues to create works that honor heritage and history while inspiring cultural connection.

Over the past four decades, HC’s Permanent Art Collection has fostered strong connections between the college and local arts community. With a heavy emphasis on new acquisitions, this year’s exhibition features the work of fourteen artists who have lived, worked or exhibited in the Tampa Bay region. Ranging from the 1990s to the present, Lingering Echoes includes artworks from the collection alongside installations from the college’s evolving public art program, reflecting on permanence, ephemerality, memory and place. Encompassing themes such as environment, relationships, form, and memory, this annual exhibition aims to investigate and amplify Tampa’s artistic landscape and the artists who have traversed it.

Artists include: Jaime Aelavanthara, George Anderton, Susan Bartos, Suzanne Camp Crosby, Miguel A. Fleitas, Samson Huang, Nneka Jones, Lisa McCarthy, Duncan McClellan, Anthony Record, Stephen Schatz, Tory Tepp, Suzanne Williamson and Theo Wujcik.