William Blizard Gallery - Past Shows - 2026
Valerie Lyons: Not All Birds Are Blackbirds
and Adam Viens: The Ethics of Ambiguity
March 2-April 3
The William Blizard Gallery presents two concurrent exhibitions that explore perception, meaning, and presence in a world defined by transience. Together, Adam Viens and Valerie Lyons lean into intuition as a mode of practice. Viens engages silence as structure through large-scale abstract paintings that suspend resolution and resist the overproduction of meaning. Lyons offers sculptural and sonic works that move through light, shadow, and care—acts of witnessing where perception itself becomes devotional. In the context of a college gallery, these exhibitions take on particular resonance. They invite students, faculty, and the wider community into a shared space of inquiry where art becomes both reflection and experiment. By foregrounding intuition, both artists resist the demand for fixed answers, instead modeling how creative practice can cultivate attentiveness, ambiguity, and relational understanding. Placed side by side, the exhibitions move through the complexity of contemporary life—between human and natural, reason and intuition, spirit and form. Art here becomes a pedagogical act as much as an aesthetic one: a meditation on how we remain present amid uncertainty, transformation, and change.
Painting by Adam Viens, Sculpture by Valerie Lyons