"Notes on Amity" by Linda King Ferguson, the artist on display in the Hartwig Gallery at Bay College in Escanaba. (Submitted photo)

ESCANABA – Bay College’s Hartwig Gallery is featuring “Equivalence,” an exhibition by artist Linda King Ferguson.

A reception and artist talk has been set for 2 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 23, in the Hartwig Gallery. The gallery is free and open to the public.

Linda King Ferguson, born in 1954 in Battle Creek, Mich., thinks of her abstract paintings as social bodies defined by relational determinants. Through a material language of open and closed forms, color gradients, surface depths, and spatial proximities she explores the subjectivity of vulnerability and strength, according to her artist’s bio.

Ferguson earned a bachelor of fine arts from Alma College in Alma, Mich.; a master of arts from Rhode Island School of Design; and a master of fine arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She also studied at Penland School of Crafts and Academia Di Belle Arti in Perugia, Italy.

Ferguson has an affiliation with Minus Space, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Red Arrow, Nashville, Tenn.; and representation from La Fontsee Gallery, Grand Rapids, Mich. Ahead in 2026, Ferguson has a two-person exhibition at Candaro Marble Building Museum, Knoxville, Tenn. In 2024, she had a solo exhibition at N.Y. Artists Equity Gallery, “An Unthought Logic,” and a solo exhibition at Graci Gallery, “Kiss the Sky.” Also, she has had solo exhibitions at DeVos Art Museum, Channel To Channel, Lipscomb University and Susan Hensel Online Gallery.

Ferguson is currently exhibiting in Red Arrow’s Group exhibitions, “Intersection” and “Hot Summer.” She has participated in other group exhibitions at Graci Gallery; Minus Space; New York Artists Equity Gallery; White Columns Online; dodomu Digital Gallery; and Odetta Digital Gallery.

Ferguson was awarded residences in 2023 at Press Here Projects; 2009 at Morris Graves Foundation; and 2008, Ragdale Foundation. She also was a resident artist semi-annually from 2013 to 2017 at Cathouse FUNeral, Brooklyn, N.Y. Ferguson was awarded a Personal Development Grant from the State of Michigan in 2015, and a Northern Michigan University Educational Research Grant in 2013.

Her work is published in Hyperallergic; New American Paintings, Vol.113; Presence; Artdose Magazine; and Boulevard Nos.68-69. From 2017 to 2023, Ferguson was founder and director of The Bakery, a non-profit, artist-run project space in Munising.

As contingent faculty, she taught from 2008 to 2013 at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. Ferguson divides her time between studios in Marquette and Nashville, TN.

In her artist statement, Ferguson said, “As a painter who believes in the language of abstraction, I think of my works as emotive social bodies. My 2025 Equivalence Series mingles graphic planar painted forms with hard edges among gradated hued and stained atmospheres, flirting with suggestive relations and tellings. Although Roland Barthes spoke about humanity’s general condition, writing, ‘work is a defense against mortality,’ personal experiences that created ruptures such as cancer, COVID isolation, and physical displacements give a curative subjectivity to my practice which employs techniques that reveal and conceal. Trauma and mending pose questions about the tension between the duality of strength and vulnerability and their counterparts of disability and healing and hope and generosity. Careful labors and construction give way to transformative states that translate the circumstances of a changed life with shifting social conditions into an abstracted language with mnemic traces.”