Upcoming Exhibitions and Events

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.

In Healing Properties, Kendra Frorup explores memory, healing and identity through prints and sculptures created around her 2024–2025 Fulbright Fellowship in the Bahamas. Inspired by her family’s bush farm—land first cultivated by her mother through a government lease-to-own program—Frorup documents the plants and traditions of bush medicine, a practice rooted in resilience and care. Bordering the Bonefish Pond National Park, the farm becomes a site of remembrance and renewal, reflecting her family’s history with cancer and her own journey of recovery. Transforming collected and natural materials, Frorup turns the act of making into an act of healing.

Kendra Frorup is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at the University of Tampa. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Syracuse University in 1996 and has widely exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Experience daytime Ybor at Now On View, Hillsborough College’s free, one-day-only public art festival in historic Ybor City. Meet Tampa-based artists and enjoy four hours of music, interactive visual art and live performance reflecting on Tampa’s past, present and future. 

The festival is walkable and family-friendly and takes place at three venues: HC Ybor City, Hotel Haya and Tempus Projects at Kress Contemporary. Held on the same day as the Ybor City Chamber of Commerce’s Fiesta Day, this Art Week Tampa event offers visitors and locals an easy way to explore Ybor’s arts, culture and history.

Now On View is organized by Grounds4Art@HC and is made possible with the support of the Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners. Additional support comes from our project partners, including the Arts Council of Hillsborough County, HC Foundation, HC Student Government Association, Hotel Haya and Tempus Projects.

Learn more at hcfl.edu/NowOnView.