Aaron Soulberry was 13 years old when the University of Evansville dedicated the new Melvin Peterson Gallery at the corner of Lincoln and Weinbach avenues in 2010. He grew up in the surrounding East Side neighborhood and regularly walked past the building, remembering it as a former strip shopping center with a bookstore where he would buy trading cards. When it transitioned into an art gallery in his proverbial backyard, it planted a quiet belief that another path was possible for him.
For a time, the New Tech Institute graduate tried more familiar career routes — working third shift at a factory and taking college classes at Ivy Tech Community College — but none felt like the right fit. “This is Evansville; we’re in a blue-collar city. You’re kind of taught to have your fun hobbies, but eventually you’re going to have to grow up and work a trade, go to college, be a business person. And my imagination was just … (My) creativity was just too big for that,” Soulberry says. His journals were filled with drawings and dreams, and he kept coming back to the feeling that he was meant for a different path. He spent hours at Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library, exploring mediums and constructing different styles of art pieces in a studio space that the library offers free of charge.
More than 15 years later, Soulberry has returned to the corner of Lincoln and Weinbach avenues — this time, as the artist he once quietly imagined himself to be. As this year’s University of Evansville Artist in Residence with his exhibition, “A New Shade of Soul,” Soulberry uses bold colors and a layered collage style to reflect on dreaming big, persisting, and the responsibility to share creative energy with others.
Soulberry regularly invites others to participate in his work, especially young artists. He encourages them to see their own imaginations and dreams as valuable and achievable. For him, art is a form of civic engagement — it is something to be built, shared, and experienced together rather than viewed from a distance.
In the center of the Peterson Gallery, piled on the floor around a podium, lies Soulberry’s “Three Miles ’Til Infinity,” a cascading chain of paper links created with help from friends, students, and community members. Each participant added a slip of paper inscribed with a dream, fastening it to a growing chain until the piece stretched the symbolic length of three miles — the farthest distance the human eye can naturally see before the Earth’s curvature limits the view.
As Soulberry explains, that physical limit has always felt to him like another way of thinking about infinity — the point where vision reaches as far as it can go. By building the work one small link at a time, he wanted to show that goals which feel unreachable often are accomplished through simple, steady steps, each one as humble as a strip of paper.
Anne McKim, former Executive Director of the Arts Council of Southwestern Indiana, says this spirit of inclusion is the foundation of Soulberry’s craft. “Aaron’s work has always centered on the belief that everyone is creative, and everyone can take part in the creative process,” she notes. “The University of Evansville turning that old bookstore into a gallery and inspiring him to imagine becoming an artist is exactly what he now does for others.”
McKim adds that Soulberry has become her first call when a project needs someone who can energize people and bring the community together through art. His sincerity, openness, and refusal to treat art as exclusive make him a natural connector. His own journey, she says, is a reminder of why access to creative spaces matters — you never know who is watching, or who might see a doorway into their own future.
For Soulberry, this residency is more than a professional milestone. It is a full-circle moment — one that links a childhood sense of possibility with a present-day commitment to community. In returning to the gallery that once ignited his desire to be a working artist, he is helping to foster that sense of possibility in others.
Professor Emeritus Eric Renschler — the newest recipient of the Mayor’s Art Award — and UE’s Associate Dean of the Ridgway College of Arts & Science and Director of Community Art Engagement met Soulberry through UE trustee Steve Worthington, who was seated with Soulberry at the Arts Council’s Mayor’s Art Awards banquet in August. “Aaron’s passion for the craft, strong local ties, and commitment to community engagement made him an ideal choice for the Efroymson Family Fund’s Emerging Artist recognition in the Melvin Peterson Gallery,” Renschler says.
“A New Shade of Soul” is on display at the Melvin Peterson Gallery through Feb. 28, with an opening reception and artist talk scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Feb. 12.
Shelbyville, Indiana, native Amanda Krause, Dean of the Ridgway College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Evansville, is an academic writer who believes great communities are built by local artists, local businesses, and local voices.
