PHOTO PROVIDED Artist Nina Elder will have her works on display at the Lycoming College Art Gallery next month, in an exhibit called “All actions have a past and a future.”

Artist, researcher, and visual storyteller, Nina Elder has been invited to be an Artist-in-Residence at Lycoming College during the spring semester 2026, a press release said.

Elder’s residency includes a solo exhibit — “All actions have a past and a future” — at the Lycoming College Art Gallery that will bring together two video works, “Overburden” and “Tongue Stones,” and 13 drawings from two series, “Uplift” and “Timepieces.” These intricate drawings reveal the artist’s conceptually oriented material practice that addresses natural resources and extractive industries expressed through her use of site-specific pigments, including coal and wildfire charcoal, industrial pulp mill waste, marine motor lubricant, glacial silt, and stardust.

Elder’s work invites viewers to contemplate our environmental impact, observing: “We are interfering with geologic time and geologic process, and I don’t know if the earth will heal from what we have done to it.” She continued, “I believe we can take actions now that mean we will be ancestors to a better future.”

The artist’s drawings are often based on historic and sometimes classified photographs as well as those resulting from her own fieldwork. Reflecting on her practice, the artist noted an interest in exploring moments “when the human hand comes in contact with the natural world and potentially changes an individual and the economy in a place forever.”

With a focus on changing cultures and ecologies, Elder advocates for collaboration, fostering relationships between institutions, artists, scientists, and diverse communities. Her work takes many forms, including drawings, performative lectures, pedagogy and critical writing, long-term community-based projects, and public art.

At the Lycoming College Art Gallery, Elder’s exhibit will include a “learning lab” for hands-on creative engagement that aims to stimulate curiosity, reflection, and dialogue. The “learning lab” will be a meeting place to share ideas and learn together, encouraging visitors to the gallery to explore connections with the themes and ideas explored through the artist’s work on view.

Elder believes “The power of art is to help us learn the future that we want to bring into being. It helps us envision the unforeseeable and the unthinkable and reflect on the current moment with great potency to understand what the future might look like.”

During Elder’s residency, which takes place March 16-20, she will be on campus and at the Lycoming College Art Gallery to collaborate with students and faculty. She will offer several facilitated workshops within the “Learning Lab” at the Gallery for students and faculty. Her exhibit at the Lycoming College Art Gallery, 25 West Fourth St., will be on display from Feb. 6-March 28, with a gallery reception at 5 p.m. on March 20.

The gallery is open Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 4-8 p.m. For more information, visit the gallery online at: https://www.lycoming.edu/art/gallery/24-25.aspx.