Art Exhibitions - Mattie Kelly Arts Center Galleries

Gallery Hours: 9:00 am to 4:00 pm Monday to Thursday; 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm Sundays and 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. prior to performances in the mainstage theater. Mattie Kelly Fine & Performing Arts Center Galleries at Northwest Florida State College, Niceville. Free and open to the public. Opening reception: Friday, January 14 at 5:00 p.m. The ?Beauvais Lyons, Association for Creative Zoology? exhibition in the Mattie Kelly Arts Center?s McIlroy Gallery features brilliant and beautiful prints by BeauvaisLyons, curator of the Hokes Archives at the University of Tennessee. Lyons is one of America?s foremost creators of academic parodies and artistic hoaxes. In this exhibition he subtly calls attention to the debate over creation v. evolution through zoological prints, fabricated ?artifacts?, and other unique works that evoke scientific specimens from the 19th century, including both two and three-dimensional works that visually describe ?zoomorphic juncture?. In the Holzhauer Gallery the ?die Wunderkammer? exhibition will convert the gallery into a large-scale cabinet of curiosities with rarely-seen objects and works from NWF State College?s Permanent Collections. In the sixteenth- nineteenth centuries, wealthy Europeans displayed their collections in the format of a Wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonders, a compact museum that not only showed off the collector?s wealth and good taste butalso conveyed his (or his family?s) well-rounded range of objects owned. Wunderkammer frequently housed collections of fine art, antiquities, historical objects, books, and scientific specimens alongside oddities of the natural world.