Students go wild with nature art on display at Rookery Bay
5 – minute read
This spring, a collaboration between two Florida Gulf Coast University art classes and the Rookery Bay Environmental Learning Center in Naples gave students the chance to highlight Southwest Florida’s flora and fauna through photography and sculpture.
“Wildlife and Wild Places: A Collaborative Exhibition” is on display at the center now through Aug. 1. It features student work from FGCU’s spring 2025 History of Photography and Sculpture II courses.
For Cape Coral native Donovan Souppa (‘25, integrated studies), the wild theme was a natural fit.
“I’ve always been drawn to wildlife photography and conservation photography,” Souppa said. “At FGCU, with how mindful and focused we are on sustainability, I feel like it was a good opportunity for us to add a sustainable element into a course you typically wouldn’t see it in.”
Shared focus on sustainability
Rookery Bay’s team approached FGCU’s gallery director, John Loscuito, last fall to discuss an art collaboration. Loscuito thought their proposal to display student art in the Learning Center was a good fit for FGCU because not only do both entities have a shared focus on environmental sustainability, but the partnership is also an opportunity to showcase student work off campus.
“It’s always wonderful to have FGCU partner with outside organizations in general, to make the work we do here more visible to the region,” Loscuito said. “A lot of our mission with the gallery and the art program is to get our students out into the communities and make those relationships happen, to encourage them to be exhibiting outside of campus.”
FGCU holds about 10 exhibitions a year where student artists can showcase their work, including the Wasmer Art Gallery, the Wilson G. Bradshaw Library, the sculpture garden and campus murals. Showing work off campus is an exciting experience for students, Loscuito said.
“This might be the first exhibition some students may have, which is a wonderful opportunity for us to provide for them. It shows that they can exhibit as professional artists,” he said.
‘One of the most rewarding things’
This was the case for rising senior art major Eva Petrovski, who was excited to display her art outside of FGCU for the first time.
“Seeing my work up on a gallery wall, and seeing people looking at it and discussing it and smiling at it is probably one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever gotten to experience,” she said of her opening night debut.
Petrovski’s sculpture, a 3-foot-long panther designed to hang on a wall as though it is climbing upwards, won Best in Show in the sculpture category on the opening night of “Wildlife and Wild Places.” She estimates she spent 50 hours creating the sculpture.
“I used materials I’ve never worked with before, so I was taking a big leap with this,” she said.
The panther is made of industrial foam, a drywall compound-based papier-mâché, gesso, paint, jewelry wire, floral wire and whiskers her cat had shed.
Focus on feathered friends
Souppa’s project, which won Best in Show in photography, represents a subject he’s been photographing since high school — burrowing owls.
“Growing up, owls specifically have been a huge focus of mine. We always had them in my front yard growing up,” he said. “I kind of learned how to become a photographer by taking photos of them.”
The burrowing owls photograph he displayed at the exhibition sold on opening night. It’s the first photograph he has ever sold.
“That was really exciting,” he said. “I actually had my parents and my friends come that night, the people who have kind of pushed me towards pursuing photography and really giving it my all. It was a really empowering thing to have happen at the end of my college journey.“
Connecting with nature
Loscuito and the course instructors, Hannah Harley and Steve Hughart, selected the pieces to be displayed. He said they found a common thread among much of the work: the “joy of connecting with wild spaces and wildlife.”
Both Petrovski and Souppa hope the exhibition helps attendees to discover this joy in Southwest Florida’s natural environment.
“No two things were the same,” Petrovski said of the exhibit. “It really makes you appreciate the variety that we have here.”
“I think my peers and I really highlighted aspects of Southwest Florida that are often overlooked,” Souppa said. “Once you leave the doors of Rookery Bay, you walk right back into the ecosystems that we’re surrounded by. We have so much access to different ecosystems here in Florida that a lot of other parts of the country don’t have.”
Loscuito hopes the exhibition inspires students to think outside the box when it comes to displaying their work. “The audience for artwork is much broader than traditional art galleries, universities or museums. It can be at nature centers, science museums and many other locations.”