Blog
Twelve Months in Stories: Reviewing 2025
December 01, 2025
As the days get shorter and the air gets chillier, it becomes the perfect excuse to gather with friends and family, share memories, and enjoy traditions old and new. As we wrap up 2025 at the GVSU Art Museum, we’re looking back on the many stories that filled our year.
Stories help us learn, connect, make sense of our experiences, and feel like we belong—and we are grateful for every one of them. We hope that the stories we have shared through our collection, the art in our buildings, our exhibitions, and programs continue to spark empathy, curiosity, and understanding throughout the GVSU community.
Each member of the GVSU Art Museum was asked to select their favorite story from 2025. There were so many amazing moments that brought the GVSU community together through art that we each struggled to select just one! As we count down to a new year, reflect on some of your favorite moments from 2025.
Best wishes for the New Year from the GVSU Art Museum- we are excited to bring even more stories to you all in 2026!
“Ruth Crowe's The Journal Project exhibition was a favorite for me this year. I love Ruth's mixed media, collage-like prints. They are amazing works of art and tell layered stories related to gender and culture at different stages in life, which resonated with me.”
- Georgine Bello, Art Museum Assistant
“This past year, one of my favorite building projects was working on the renovation of the Mark A. Murray Living Center and the Ronald F. VanSteeland Living Center . Within these spaces, we wanted to emphasize works by our alumni and local West Michigan artists to show how local artwork makes a big impact on our GV community. Within these buildings, we featured two Muskegon artists, DeAnthony Carter and Joey Williams , who happen to be father and son!”
- Alison Christensen, Project Manager and Curator of Public Spaces
“This past year, one of my favorite moments was collaborating with artist Jonathan Thunder as we acquired his work “Heads in the Clouds” for the collection and featured it in our Stories Reimagined exhibition. Jonathan extended the life of the painting by creating a companion digital animation, allowing us to build an augmented reality experience that brought the piece into a new dimension. The project became a powerful reflection on how we tell stories across time—honoring traditional narratives while expanding how we experience and interpret stories in the digital age.”
- Nathan Kemler, Director of Galleries and Collection
“I’ve really enjoyed all the opportunities I have had to work with
students this past year. Through classroom visits, K-12 field trips,
working with our student employees, and our student Friends of Art
membership, we have been engaging with artwork in a variety of ways!
I’ve really enjoyed the response to some of the gallery teaching
activities I have offered this past year, in particular the
Ekphrastic Erasure Poetry exercise (learning resource to come!).
I’ve been very impressed by the mindful approach students have taken
to this activity, and the poems they created inspired by artwork.”
- Jessica Sundstrom, Learning and Outreach Manager
"I love how every new artist we add brings new stories to life in our collection, especially when those stories reflect the GVSU community. This year, we worked with Professor Bill Hosterman to collect artwork from students in some of his printmaking classes . It's always interesting to see how different student responses to the same project prompt can be."
- Nicole Webb, Collections Manager and Curator of Content
“ As an art preparator, I get to work with many kinds of art across a variety of mediums. I face many unique challenges when I'm installing art onsite. Reinstalling the work “Function or Submarine” by Hoon Lee was rewarding and required me to think outside the box while working at a great height.”
- Tia Wierenga, Art Museum Preparator
“One of my favorite stories that we told in our exhibitions this year was about the intersection of art and technology that artists were using with their work. In Stories Reimagined: Artistic Narrative in the Digital Age , Jonathan Thunder contributed an oil painting entitled “Head in the Clouds” that illustrates a surreal setting on a lake where a couple is both connected and disconnected to land, culture, and each other. What was most moving about this imagined narrative was how Thunder leaned into his animation and filmmaking background to create a digital animation of the same work, layered with sounds of a lake and birds calling.”
- Joel Zwart, Curator of Exhibitions and Collections
Hoon Lee, Function or Submarine, bamboo, 2008, 2008.379.1.
Paloma Havlik, Resilience’s Memory, etching, 2025, 2025.24.6.
DeAnthony Carter, Powerline, oil on canvas, 2025.29.1.
Ruth Crowe, Keep the Secret (from the exhibition The
Journal Project), mixed media.
Jonathan Thunder, Head in the
Clouds, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, 2021, 2025.25.1a.
SPA 330 doing the Ekphrastic Erasure poetry exercise using a Spanish
text from their class.