If post-holiday fatigue has followed you into 2026, this might be the moment to slow down with a stroll through a local art gallery.
The gallery shows on display at the Harrison Center this winter center around themes of healing, renewal and recovery.
If you go
The Harrison Center
🗓️ These shows run through Feb. 27; galleries are open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday-Friday
📍 1505 N. Delaware St.
🎟️ Free
“Love Handles and Cow Licks” – Johnny McKee
In the Harrison Gallery, you’ll find Johnny McKee’s solo painting exhibition, “Love Handles and Cow Licks,” where he moves beyond his usual cloudscapes and starscapes into something more abstract.
That direction came after a bout of tendonitis left McKee, 51, unable to use his right arm.
Searching for a way to continue creating art, McKee recalled some advice from Indianapolis-based artist and former Indianapolis Star columnist Steve Mannheimer.
“One time he gave unsolicited advice at one of my openings,” McKee recalled. “He said, ‘You need to get out of your comfort zone and start just, like, throwing paper on the floor.’”
So that’s exactly what McKee did — throwing paper on the floor and using his non-dominant left hand to paint. Rather than trying to create anything representational, he took the attitude o,f “Let’s play with these shapes and see what happens.”
“Florescence” – Leslie Dolin
In Hank & Dolly’s Gallery, you’ll find work by Leslie Dolin, who has also been experimenting outside her comfort zone.
“Florescence” is Dolin’s first solo exhibition of paintings since 2012. These new paintings (and some monotypes as well) are based on reference photos taken at night in her garden.
After her daughter Sage went to college, Dolin had more time to pursue her art. But she also missed her daughter terribly. Painting, rather than her usual printmaking, helped her deal with the emotional toll.
“There’s more physical movement in it, and it’s more tactile, and it’s immediate,” Dolin said, comparing the two art forms. “I can immediately make decisions, whereas with printmaking, once you’ve started, you don’t even know the outcome till it’s done.”
You can get a sense of this work in “Red Flower for a Blue Jay,” which shows a flower as a singular focus, with the background dissolving behind it. It doesn’t seem to depart much from realism, yet there’s something kaleidoscopic about it.
“The Resilience of Hope” – Stephanie Lewis Robertson
Another artist wrestling with emotions is Stephanie Lewis Robertson, 66, in the Speck Gallery. Her solo exhibition, “The Resilience of Hope,” includes small watercolor studies and large panels of painted and quilted silk.
“They’re kind of based on emotions, feeling the idea of what nature looks like to me in a very abstract way,” Robertson said.
But there is also an interplay, in her work, between personal spaces and the natural world.
Her husband Tom’s health challenges have also inspired her artmaking. He fractured his pelvis in November, which landed him in rehab. The MRI of his injured pelvis wound up inspiring one of her silk paintings. The piece is called “Fractures Heal.”
“Given time, we can heal, and ‘Fractures Heal’ can also talk about the state of our world at any given time that we are often fractured,” she said.
“Everyday Poetics” – Chris Hill
Chris Hill’s photo exhibit “Everyday Poetics” at the Underground Gallery also pays attention to fractures. Riding the IndyGo bus, Hill finds moments of both societal fracture and unexpected beauty — sometimes both at the same time.
You’ll see photos that he took in Oklahoma City, where he had a car, and in Indianapolis, where he didn’t.
“One advantage, for me, from walking or riding the bus is I am able to observe my surroundings instead of having to pay attention to the road while driving,” he said.
One of his photographs, titled “White on White” depicts a sun-bleached advertisement on the side of King’s Beauty Supply featuring a Black model for a product called Shake-N-Go.
“Her skin was bleached out,” said Hill. “So from a formal perspective, the ad itself, it was quite beautiful, being bleached out. So I decided to play around with that idea and expand on that idea.”
Conceptually, the photograph is complicated. You might read into it a subtext about the billion-dollar skin-whitening industry in the United States, or about how media and advertising influence ideas of race and beauty.
But just because Hill, 55, is attentive to the dynamics shaping marginalized communities doesn’t mean he wants to leave viewers with a single, fixed takeaway.
“As long as it’s at least viewed,” he said, “and secondly, for someone to develop some type of relationship with it.”
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Dan Grossman is a Mirror Indy freelance contributor. You can reach him at dan@indycorrespondent.org.
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