A Season of Wonder

This summer, The Frank C. Ortis Art Gallery invites visitors into a world of transformation, connection, and curiosity through its 2025 Summer Exhibition Series. Featuring three immersive exhibitions—Hidden Worlds by Dr. Sara C. Schesser Bartra, Let There Be Light by Magda Love, and Echoes of Memory and Nature by Angela Bolaños—the gallery becomes more than a space for viewing art. It becomes a living ecosystem of knowledge, memory, and imagination.

Curated by Chief Curator Sophie Bonet, the Summer Series continues The Frank’s mission to offer accessible and inclusive programming to all members of the public. As a municipally operated art space rooted in one of South Florida’s most culturally diverse communities, The Frank champions artists whose practices speak across disciplines, generations, and identities. Here, contemporary art becomes a portal to the unseen, the ancestral, and the deeply personal.

In Hidden Worlds, artist and microbiologist Dr. Sara C. Schesser Bartra reveals the invisible ecosystems that exist within and around us. From gut microbes to soil fungi to photosynthetic algae, her colorful, interactive installations make complex science not only approachable but magical. Visitors can step into a glowing gut tunnel, explore an artistic “lab” of sculptural tools, and discover the microbial symphonies playing out beneath our feet and within our bodies. With installations inspired by real-world labs and living organisms, Bartra bridges the gap between science and art with playfulness and care, making this exhibition especially engaging for children, families, and curious minds of all ages.

Bartra’s work reminds us that we are never alone—we are host to entire ecosystems that nourish us, protect us, and keep us in balance. Through touchable displays, video, and layered resin works, she invites visitors to consider what it means to be alive in a web of mutual dependence. The result is a space where education, wonder, and wellness converge.

In the Main Gallery, Magda Love’s Let There Be Light invites audiences into a radiant world of emotional and ecological renewal. Drawing on her Argentine roots and the cycles of light and darkness, Love uses recycled materials, folk art traditions, and intimate symbolism to tell stories of resilience, ancestry, and healing. Her luminous mixed-media works speak to both personal transformation and collective memory, channeling everything from maternal care and childhood wonder to migration and environmental stewardship.

Through bold color, flowing fabrics, and reimagined found objects, Let There Be Light positions light not only as a physical phenomenon, but as a metaphor for inner growth and divine wisdom. It’s a body of work rooted in ritual, lineage, and care—a vibrant invitation to reflect on the spaces within us that need nurturing and on the power we each hold to illuminate the world around us.

In the Lobby and Third Space Gallery, Angela Bolaños offers a quieter but no less powerful experience. Her exhibition, Echoes of Memory and Nature, is an exploration of ancestral craft, memory, and the natural world through two site-specific installations: Woven Circlescapes and When the Rain Speaks. Raised in Honduras and now based in Miami, Bolaños draws upon Central American textile traditions and Indigenous cosmologies to create immersive environments shaped by gesture, sound, and emotion.

In Woven Circlescapes, handwoven circles made from natural fibers and gold thread suspend like constellations, offering a soft map of memory and sacred time. The circles hover in the air, embodying the cyclical nature of recollection, ritual, and belonging. In When the Rain Speaks, sheer fabrics cascade from the ceiling, evoking rainfall and inviting viewers into a multisensory meditation on migration, grief, and renewal. Inspired by Mesoamerican rain deities, the installation transforms water into metaphor, into memory, into presence.

Bolaños’s work is not simply visual—it is felt. It resists the austerity of the traditional gallery and instead affirms the space as a site of refuge, tenderness, and intergenerational dialogue. In a fractured world, Echoes of Memory and Nature offers circularity as a healing force—a return to story, to land, and the body.

Together, these three exhibitions form a collective act of transformation. They engage the senses, stimulate the mind, and speak across disciplines—biology, mythology, ancestral memory, and material poetry. At the heart of the Summer Exhibition Series is a commitment to access and inclusion: all exhibitions and artist activations are free and open to the public, with tours in English and Spanish, hands-on workshops, and family-centered programming designed to engage audiences of all ages.

The Frank’s Summer Series is more than an exhibition—it’s an invitation to explore the invisible, the inherited, and the interconnected. Through light, thread, and microbial life, visitors are asked to slow down, look closer, and feel more deeply. In doing so, they may find themselves transformed, too.

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For more information visit thefrankgallery.org.

Gallery Hours: Wednesday–Saturday | 11 AM – 5 PM

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