January-February Exhibit at Sertoma Arts Center

Exhibition Details

• On View: January 6 - February 24, 2026
• Hours:
  • Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m. - 10 p.m.
  • Friday, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m.
  • Saturday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
  • Sunday, 12 p.m. - 5 p.m.
• Location: Sertoma Arts Center, 1400 W Millbrook Road, Raleigh, NC 27612
• Cost: Free and open to the public

To purchase artwork, contact Sertoma Arts Center for details.

Artist Reception

Join us at Sertoma Arts Center on Saturday, January 17, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. for a free opening reception. Meet the artists, learn about their work and creative processes, and enjoy an afternoon at the Sertoma Arts Center.  

The Artists

M.U.S.E

The Raleigh Room exhibit features M.U.S.E, a collective dedicated to amplifying Latina voices through visual art, cultural memory, and collective expression. This exhibition is more than artwork on walls—it’s storytelling, heritage, and lived experience made visible. Each artist brings their own perspective, history, and creative language, but together we form a shared narrative rooted in identity, resilience, and imagination. The exhibiting artists are Yholima Vargas-Pedrazzo from Colombia, Aurelis Lugo from Puerto Rico, Maria Tavarez from Dominican Republic and Alicia De Dios Fernandez from Mexico. 

Ruth Smith

(Un)Becoming 

This series explores how people, memories, and connections shift and change over time. Portraits and familiar objects are taken apart and reassembled, creating surreal, dreamlike images that blur the line between self and other. The work reflects on identity — personal, familial, and generational — and how relationships shape who we become. I’m also drawn to the unseen structures that connect us to the natural world, from plant cells to hidden life patterns. Together, these pieces explore how we’re constantly evolving through our connections with others and the world around us.

Emily Ligon

Broken: Living with Multiple Sclerosis

The Broken collection by Emily Ligon represents her experience of being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, a neurodegenerative auto-immune disease, and the impact the progressive disease has on her body, mind, and life. The collection of 2D and 3D pieces was created over 5 years, capturing different moments in her continued journey to understanding her disease and how she experiences it in both visible and invisible ways.

Irena Cepulyte

Originally from Lithuania, she lives and creates ceramic art by the quiet beauty of Jordan Lake and its surrounding forest, which inspire her daily. Her art is deeply rooted in her Baltic heritage, which has always honored the natural world. Through clay, she explores organic forms and emotional states of life primarily in female forms. Each piece is a quiet offering — a dialogue between her and life , land and spirit.

Jeffery Guin

Shrouded in Inevitable Realization

This series is based around my personal experience with grief after the death of my father at 15. During the years after his death I struggled immensely with this loss, while having little-to-no understanding of its impact on my adolescent mind. The veil shrouding the figures in this series represent the disconnect between what was happening internally and what I could acknowledge either to myself or to others. The pose the figures sit or lay is one of clear emotional anguish, allowing anyone looking from the outside to see the state they are in, while the subject believes they are hiding it, and furthermore hiding from it themselves. This work is not about resolution. It’s about lingering in that moment before the realization, in the space where denial and exposure live side by side. It’s about the emotional habits that form when grief goes unspoken for too long, and the quiet but heavy cost of trying to keep that pain buried and delaying the fallout of recognizing the emotional scar it has left.