THE MOREAN ARTS CENTER June Bunch Previews April/May Exhibits & Events

The Morean Arts Center's June Bunch takes us on a tour of exhibits & events coming up in April 2026, including the new Spring Classes.
June Bunch: State Flower Ladies  Opening Reception/Meet the Artist:
Saturday, April 11, 5pm to 8pm
Gallery Talk with June Bunch + Live Music:
Thursday, April 23, 5:30pm to 7pm
On view: April 3 – May 2
For State Flower Ladies, June Bunch transforms 50 state flowers into botanical ballerinas. Her illustrations combine figure drawing with floral theatrics, adding elements of vibrant colors and texture-rich embroidery to her work. In an instant, her images stretch the viewer’s eye past the present to see the blossom’s full-seasonal vitality, summarized in one frozen motion.   Bunch curates contemporary illustrations by studying plants’ “choreography” of growth, illuminating their dance with vibrant colors and clean lines. Her visual art remains rooted in botany and ballet, featuring postures that hold emotional richness, highlighting human nature and flora in a bold, empowering way.   The art is created first through expressive figure drawings and botanical sketches that are then translated digitally and drawn line-by-line with a pen-tool, tending to each marking with thoughtful detail.  To dive into the story behind each illustration, you can visit https://www.junebunch.com/illustration
About the artist:   June Bunch (@junebunchstudio) is a self-taught illustrator from St. Petersburg, FL. Her art focuses on natural growth, interpreting plants’ movement through human body language. She studied botany and illustrated for plant nurseries before moving to Juneau, AK  as a naturalist guide. There, June grew inspired by the “choreography” of the natural world around her and humanized it, incorporating figure drawing paired with a love of dance. Her work has won an honorable mention at the Morean Arts Center and has been on display at the Imagine Museum, Dunedin Fine Arts Center, Five Deuces Galleria, Art@400, The Werk Gallery, and the Gulf Coast Arts Alliance Gallery. She has recently been awarded a micro-grant from the Gobioff Foundation which sponsored a portion of the State Flower Ladies exhibition.
Alexia Benavent: De aquí, De allá - Connecting with Home
Opening Reception: April 11, 5-9pm  On View: April 11 – May 2
Morean Center for Clay: 420 22nd St. S.
Artist’s Statement  In a diaspora often the only thing you can take from your home are memories. Suddenly everything can be a reservoir of memory, old photos of a favorite restaurant, a bowl you used every day from your mother’s kitchen. Even rusty tools from a childhood home can become treasured keepsakes and tangible connections to places that are not the same and may only exist now in this handful of remembrances. In a world that so strongly wants to deny you a place, they take you back to a time you didn’t even realize was so precious. Anything too big to fit in a suitcase is left behind forever. Items like photos are some of the last reminders of a home now long gone. This exhibition is an exploration of the tenderness and fragility of the past, conducted through the use of soft and hard materials. The objects chosen are small, mundane, and often ephemeral to show how everyone finds their own way to carry home with them. During the creation of each object care was taken to preserve signs of the artist’s hands to signify a level of care for memory even found in seemingly insignificant objects.
JENNY DAY: Happy Birthday, Stinky  Opening Reception: April 11, 5-9pm
On View: April 11 – May 2 Morean Center for Clay: 420 22nd St. S.
Artist’s Statement  My work often holds a deep reverence for the natural world, concerns about climate change and natural disaster. Lately I have created another landscape; populated by an army of friendly creatures.  Here burdens are dismissed by the whimsical. Happy Birthday Stinky invites viewers to attend a birthday party for a skunk, complete with a dinosaur pinata, cake, ice cream, presents, balloons, and pizza. In this place worry is edged out by the fantastic and mystical. The apocalyptic is supplanted by the surreal and the allegorical. Outside influences still seep in, broken ceramic windows let in a flurry of leaves, cigarettes, old tin cans, a dead bluejay. My work often flirts with how the world might end, while simultaneously finding ways to adapt, recreate, and live on.
The Morean is proud to present the work of three seniors in the Pinellas County Center for the Arts program at Gibbs High School 4/11-5/29.
After three years of an intense visual art curriculum, students in their fourth year at PCCA begin preparation for their senior project. The senior project is required of all PCCA students wishing to graduate with a certificate from the program.   Seniors in the visual art department must develop a cohesive body of work that describes an in-depth exploration of a particular artistic concern or visual idea. Works produced between the beginning of the school year in August through the middle of February, when the first exhibitions begin, are eligible for exhibition. Usually the concept or concentration idea is not fully developed until mid-October when students begin to focus their full attention on their senior project. Students seeking a one person show at the Morean Arts Center must apply in December with examples of their work and an artist statement explaining the focus and direction of their concentration. 
Three students are then selected from the applicants by the visual arts department faculty. This is an honor for these students and a very difficult task for the faculty since a majority of the seniors apply. All other visual arts senior projects are exhibited in a series of group exhibitions between mid-February and the end of April in PCCA’s two galleries on the campus of Gibbs High School.   
April 11 – 23  Finn Reddick  April 25 – May 7  Aiden Evans  May 9 – 29
Khloe Temple 

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