Hillsborough College Art Galleries presents two new solo exhibitions by Tampa-based artists who also teach at the University of Tampa, launching the spring semester.
Samantha Modder: May Your Life Be Easy and Kendra Frorup: Healing Properties open in January at HC Art Galleries on the Ybor City and Dale Mabry campuses, offering students and community members opportunities to meet working artists, hear them speak about their practice and experience contemporary art being made in Tampa today.
Both exhibitions are free and open to the public, with opening receptions scheduled for each.
Samantha Modder: May Your Life Be Easy will be held in Gallery114@HC, located on the first floor of the Ybor City Performing Arts Building from Jan. 15 through March 12, 2026.
There will be an opening reception on Thursday, Jan. 15 from 5 to 8 p.m., with an artist talk beginning at 6 p.m. DJ New Age Tension is curating a playlist inspired by Modder’s work for the reception.
In May Your Life Be Easy, Samantha Modder combines allegory and fairytale to examine aspiration, power and interlocking systems of oppression through large-scale, digitally altered ballpoint pen drawings of Black women. Drawing its title from a blessing offered to her mother by a Nigerian village elder, the exhibition reflects on the tension between the imagined Global South and the promises of an equally imagined Global North. Inspired by Yoruba masquerade and Orisha dancers, Modder’s kinetic, storybook scenes use enchantment to confront privilege and the realities of capitalism.
Modder is a Nigerian-Sri Lankan artist born in Lagos and raised in Sri Lanka. She lives and works in Tampa and teaches at the University of Tampa. She earned a BA from Dartmouth College and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis.
Kendra Frorup: Healing Properties will be held in Gallery 221@HC, located on the second floor of the Dale Mabry Learning Resource Center from Jan. 12 through May 7, 2026.
There will be an opening reception on Thursday, Jan. 22 from 5 to 8 p.m., with an artist talk beginning at 6 p.m.
In Healing Properties, Kendra Frorup explored memory, healing and identity through prints and sculptures developed during her 2024-2025 Fulbright Fellowship in the Bahamas. Inspired by her family’s bush farm, land cultivated through a government lease-to-own program, Frorup documents plants and traditions of bush medicine rooted in resilience and care. Using collected and natural materials, she transforms the act of making into an act of healing, reflecting on family history, illness and recovery.
Frorup is an Assistant Professor of Art and Design at the University of Tampa. She received her MFA in Sculpture from Syracuse University and has exhibited nationally and internationally.
For more information, visit hcfl.edu/galleries.
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