Unbound | Works from the Collection

On View October 17 – May 16, 2026

Rolland Art Gallery

The works gathered in Unbound come from many hands and many histories. Each entered the California Lutheran University collection through personal acts of care — gifts from individuals who lived with them, from artists who taught or studied here, from alumni and friends who believed art should continue to speak beyond their own walls. Together they form a record of attention: of what moved someone enough to keep, to share, and now, to let go.

Across the exhibition runs a shared sense of release — of being between one place and another, unbound from fixed ground. Paintings and photographs carry us over wide landscapes, as if from the air. Other works turn inward: figures in meditation, seeds carried by wind, light breaking from darkness. Some invoke older languages of myth or faith — images of Christ or the Trinity, symbols of flight, renewal, and passage. Others speak in abstraction, where color and form alone trace the motion of ascent.

To be unbound is to dwell in that brief, luminous interval between what is known and what is still forming. These works remind us that beauty is not escape but attention — an opening of perception. In looking carefully, we are asked to recognize both the world’s fragility and its promise.

Art offers this kind of freedom: not from responsibility, but toward it. It calls us to see more clearly, to move more lightly, and to remember our place within something vast and shared — the air between earth and sky.