On View

October 10 – November 20, 2026

Coming to the Prindle Institute in Fall 2026, Voices and Votes: Democracy in America explores nearly 250 years of the nation’s ongoing experiment in self-government. Developed by the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum on Main Street in partnership with Indiana Humanities, this interactive exhibition invites visitors to reflect on the freedoms, struggles, and responsibilities that define civic life. Through historical artifacts, multimedia installations, and stories of revolution, suffrage, protest, and reform, Voices and Votes asks how each generation shapes — and reshapes — democracy. Presented in collaboration with the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, the Putnam County Museum, the Greencastle League of Women Voters, and the Putnam County Public Library, this national touring exhibit transforms the Institute into a gathering place for reflection, conversation, and community action.

This exhibit is made possible by generous support from Indiana Humanities, The Indiana University Arts and Humanities Council, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Barbara Fields Timm, professor of art at DePauw University, traces deep family roots to the campus—her grandparents met here in the 1920s, and both her mother and brother are alumni. After completing her graduate studies in Philadelphia, she returned to Indiana to teach, paint, and study the land that shaped her.

Just beyond DePauw’s campus lies an old limestone quarry, once scarred by decades of blasting and later transformed by time and renewal into what is now the DePauw Nature Park. In Light Puddles, Timm captures the interplay of light, water, and sky as nature reclaims what industry left behind. The work reflects her fascination with regeneration and the ever-changing rhythms of the natural world—a place, as she describes it, “never singular, never still.”

Martha Donovan Opdahl has worked professionally in fiber arts since earning her M.F.A. from Indiana University’s Hope School of Fine Art in 1985. After establishing her studio in Greencastle—with a winter studio in Santa Fe—she served as curator of the DePauw Art Collection and gallery director of the Emison Art Center before dedicating herself fully to her art in 1998.

Opdahl’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in major public and private collections, including the Mint Museum, the Museum of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Rooted in her life and work in Greencastle, Ituri Series: BIRA reflects her enduring fascination with texture, rhythm, and the natural forms that connect landscape and craft.

Meanderings is a permanent collection of photographs by Cynthia O’Dell, Professor of Art in Photography and Video and Digital Imaging at DePauw University. Commissioned by the Institute’s founding director, Robert G. Bottoms, the series captures the quiet beauty and layered history of the DePauw Nature Park—once a limestone quarry, now a place of reflection and renewal.

O’Dell, a member of the DePauw faculty since 1998 and former chair of the Art Department, explores themes of identity, memory, and place in her work. Through her lens, the Nature Park becomes a site of both personal and environmental contemplation—a landscape where light, loss, and transformation coexist.