The Iowa City Gallery Walk is back for another year! For over 25 years, this event has taken over downtown and filled your favorite businesses with wonderful works of art. Make an evening of it and grab a bite to eat, shop, and gallery walk in beautiful downtown Iowa City! The 2025 Downtown Spring Gallery Walk is Friday, March 7th from 5:00 – 8:00 p.m. This FREE event is open to everyone to enjoy a self-guided tour of shops, galleries, and other locations that have curated featured artists and pieces of art.

2025 Downtown Spring Gallery Walk

– Participating Venues and Artists Below – 

• Arts Iowa City’s ArtiFactory – Vera Ranguelova: Encaustic Art
  • Embracing the beauty and technical complexity of the ancient art of encasing painting with beeswax, resin, and pigments.
  • Artist Website
• Blick Art Materials – Bao Pham: Garden of Sweet Delights
  • Come see what sprouted in Bao’s studio this winter. These little seedlings reached for light and grew into delightful and peculiar fruits ready for picking.
• Glassando – Laura Yost: Hecho En Iowa
  • Laura creates beautiful jewelry. She freehand weaves Japanese and Czech glass beads. Using primarily peyote and herringbone stitches, she creates flat & 3-D forms with a color palette centering on earth tones.
• Iowa Artisans Gallery – David Luck: Metal Slideshows
  • Metal Sideshows will feature five of David Luck’s unique, hammered copper wall sculptures. Each mural sized wall relief is a rich mosaic of embossed copper tiles linked together into a layered, textural tapestry. David weaves sheet copper elements into large tactile surfaces that viewers respond to visually and enhances their architectural settings.
• Iowa City Public Library – Harte School of Art Students: “Humanity and Cosmos,” “The Crystal of your Soul” and “The Harmony and Balance”
  • Students’ art will be featured in several glass cases around the room and an art wall in the play area! The Harte School of Art student exhibits will be on display around the Children’s Room March-May.

• Iowa City Senior Center – Hani Elkadi: Retrospective
  • Artist Hani was described by Iowa’s leading poet, the late Paul Engle, as a “true Renaissance man of the world.” As an accomplished painter, author, poet, translator, journalist, and surgeon, he spent several years in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe before choosing Iowa City as his home in which to live, educate, and start a family with Ewa Barbach and their daughter Nina. About his art, Hani wrote: “My art is my way of representing my thoughts and passions. I travel freely through various means of expression and a plethora of methods and materials. I deeply believe in the unlimited ways of looking at nature and the surroundings, people, and their emotions, imaginations, and dreams. I never tried to deny myself the right to choose the fittest style for each theme and subject matter. I hold the strong belief that, for every situation, there is a unique artistic approach that meets its particular needs. I was lucky enough to have a career that provided me with adequate means of survival and protected my art from compromises that the art market might dictate.” Art will be on display until the end of May.
• Iowa Conservatory – Iowa Conservatory Students: Spring in the Art Studio
  • Join us in the art studio to see what Iowa Conservatory students are up to. You’ll see paintings, drawings, and sculptures displayed as well as have the chance to drop-in and draw alongside students.
• Main Library Gallery, University of Iowa Libraries – Curated by Rich Dana: A Roll of the Dice: Symbolism in the Sackner Archive 
  • In 1897, French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé revolutionized the world of graphic design with a single poem, “Un coup de dés,” that forever changed the way we look at words. This exhibition features stunning art, books, and ephemera from the Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry that has explored the immense influence of the poem on artists, writers, and culture since its publication.
  • Exhibit Guide 

• Prairie Lights Books and Cafe – Drew Mounce: Drew Mounce Gallery
  • Drew Mounce is an Iowa City based artist who studied Fine Art at the University of Texas. Artist Statement: “Surrealism allows the artist to more easily use color and composition to inspire the emotions of the viewer, much as an evocative piece of music. The artwork then becomes a portal for the viewer to explore their own inner feelings. Although the artist has a specific motivation while manifesting the artifact, this motivation becomes secondary to the spontaneous dialogue created between the artifact and the viewer. This dialogue is what ‘art’ really is, and the art is uniquely created each time it is seen from a fresh perspective.”

• Public Space One – Curated by Jeremy Chen with works by Jen P. Harris, R Kauff, Kathranne Knight, and Ajdin Kulic: “Draw Between: Possibility and Inevitability”
  • Drawn Between is an exhibition and publication project curious about the act of drawing. What happens when we draw? What is drawing for? The show title comes from the artist William Kentridge’s assertion that drawing is always “hovering” between “possibility and inevitability.”
  • Artist Information 
• r.s.v.p. – Harper Folsom, MFA candidate and Iowa Arts Fellow, UI Center for the Book: I Thought of You Today 
  • This exhibit includes messages from Iowa City residents addressed to some element of their community – the local arts scene, their neighbors, or whatever it is they feel strongly about. These sentiments are embedded in handmade kozo paper, side by side with stamps, envelopes, and other correspondence ephemera. This work is intended to encourage treating our community with tenderness, by genuinely seeing one another, and allowing ourselves to care deeply.
• Ten Thousand Villages – Taissir Abdelgadir:
  • This gallery will exhibit Sudanese batik art.
• The James Theater – Deb Talan: Prints in Paintings and Prismatic Landscapes
  • Prismatic colors and animal block prints on tissue paper featured in paintings on wood and watercolor paper.
  • 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
  • Artist Website
• U.S. Bank – Andreas Soemadi: Artem Mathematica

  • As a graphics artist, he fuses mathematics and coding (in Wolfram language) through a software called Mathematica to produce his artworks. Initially, he used Mathematica only to do some computations, drawing graphics solution for some aspects of mathematics and physics. About three years ago, he discovered ways to use Weierstrass Approximation Theorem through Bernstein polynomials, (particularly through Beziér curves), in Mathematica to produce his artworks.

• UI Stanley Museum of Art: it’s a fine thing 
• University of Iowa Museum of Natural History – Community Gallery Wall
  • The Community Gallery Wall exhibit features pieces made during Art & Write Nights.
  • Art & Write Night will take place from 5:00 – 8:00 p.m.

• Willow & Stock: City High School Art Department
  • Twenty-two advanced art students from City High School Art Department will display mixed media pieces.
  • 5:00 – 7:30 p.m.