Image: Alexia Lams, Thru My Lense, 2025
The Arts & Science Center for Southeast Arkansas in Pine Bluff is presenting Revelations of My Youth, an exhibition of acrylic paintings and drawings by the Pine Bluff artist Alexia Lams, in its Ben J. Altheimer Gallery until 9 January 2027.
The works deal with the move into young adulthood. In her statement for the exhibition, Lams describes this as a period in which her understanding of mortality, guidance, relationships and her own sense of self is being tested, and explains that she works quickly in acrylic to capture both the physical surroundings and the emotional atmosphere that prompted those moments of realisation.
Her paintings combine several modes: scenic painting, figurative portraiture and surreal imagery, handled in an expressive manner. Works reproduced on the museum's exhibition page include Thru My Lense (2025), Sweet Mercury (2024) and Awaiting Emergence (2025).
Lams completed a BFA at the University of Arkansas at Monticello in 2024. Her work has been exhibited at the Fort Smith Regional Art Museum in Arkansas, the Indianapolis Art Center in Indiana and the River Oaks Square Art Center in Louisiana, and was included in Small Works on Paper, the Arkansas Arts Council exhibition that toured the state in 2024 and 2025. In 2024 the Arkansas Art Educators Association named her its Higher Education Student of the Year.
The exhibition is sponsored by Simmons Bank, and the museum also offers a virtual version of the show online. It is on view alongside two other current exhibitions at the centre: In the Same Light: Arkansas Glass in Reflection, which brings together glasswork by the Arkansas artists Ed Pennebaker and James Hayes, and Rewilding, a show of charcoal drawings by Crystal Jennings in which human and animal forms merge with the natural world.
