“Through the Oyster Speculum” is an exhibition of artworks by Philadelphia based
artist, Sarah Peoples, opening in the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Cultural
Arts Building (CAB) Art Gallery on Monday, June 22, 2026.
The exhibition will run through Wednesday, September 9, 2026. A public reception will
be held on Thursday, August 27, 2026 from 5:30 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Summer gallery hours are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 10 a.m. to 4
p.m. and closed on Friday, beginning May 22 – August 10, 2026.
Regular gallery hours are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
with extended hours on Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The CAB Art Gallery is located on UNCW’s campus on the ground floor of the Cultural
Arts Building, near the building’s main entrance. Visitors can access the gallery from
South College Road or Racine Drive, and parking is available in front of the box office
entrance to the building.
For more information visit https://uncw.edu/seahawk-life/arts/venues/cultural-artsbuilding/
and https://linktr.ee/cabartgallery
Sarah Peoples: Through the Oyster Speculum
“Such a predetermination to eat this big universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be
absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not
before seen in any human soul,” Thomas Carlyle on American Transcendentalist
Margaret Fuller’s hunger for experience.
In a multimedia exhibition of sculptural installation, light, and sound, Sarah Peoples:
Through the Oyster Speculum reveals the stories, legends, myths, and expressions
deployed as shorthand to make sense of American identity and culture. At the
exhibition’s center, a large diorama recreates the grand American wilderness as a
theatrical tableau. This immersive environment invites close inspection, revealing
instability and distortion beneath familiar narratives. Using humor and wit, Peoples
demonstrates how the very ideas meant to define a place can simultaneously obscure
other truths, creating parallel realities or mirror worlds that coexist rather than resolving
into singular meaning.
The world, and specifically American ideals, are Sarah Peoples’ oyster, and she cracks
them open through a multivalent speculum. Derived from the Latin specere, “to look,” a
speculum refers to three distinct items: a mirror, the iridescent beauty mark on a bird’s
wing, and a medical tool for inspection. In these capacities, a speculum reflects, signals,
and reveals. The installation of artworks encapsulates all meanings of the word. By
foregrounding these disparate functions, the exhibition spotlights the unstable ground
on which perception rests. To look through the oyster speculum is to see through the
lenses of culture, history, and desire.
