Gallery 210@FAB statement:
"Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart." — Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
Gallery 210@FAB is pleased to open its 2026/2027 season with Itsy Bitsy Spider, an exhibition of powerful, enigmatic, and deeply felt work by Samantha Hunerlach-Tulin exploring time, emotion, artifact, and the meditation between them. Together, the pieces form a kind of collective tapestry of memory and one's relationship to it. I'm drawn to the artist's use and manipulation of materials, working in a fully multi-media practice. Tackling subjects as complex as time and memory seems to demand this kind of range, each medium and its nuances serving as brick and mortar to construct this dwelling of thought.
I've known the artist for some time, and I know them to be someone who creates space for others. Just as this exhibition invites the audience to contemplate meaning, Samantha's teaching practice creates a space where students can wonder, try, fail, succeed, and ultimately find their own voice in artmaking. In that same spirit, Body, Sex, Love, a collaborative quilt project exploring how we understand ourselves and our relationships developed by the artist, opens up yet another vital participatory space for the public. Making art, exhibiting it, writing about it, and inviting others to think, feel, and act are all mediums this artist works in. We are richer for that, for their work, and for the contributions they continually make to our community.
My sincere thanks to Samantha Hunerlach-Tulin for sharing their art practice with our community, and for their collegiality and commitment to teaching our students what an artistic practice can be. I also wish to thank John Joern of Cherokee Street CID, the Regional Arts Commission for their support of the artist, the broader St. Louis community, and you, for visiting Gallery 210@FAB. We hope you enjoy the exhibit.
Michael Behle
Interim Director of Gallery 210@FAB, UMSL
08/11/2026
Stroll, acrylic on canvas, 2026, 3.5ft x 6ft
Body, Sex, Love, Collaborative Quilt Project 2026
Body, Sex, Love is an ongoing collaborative quilt that examines how knowledge about our bodies, intimacy, and relationships is passed between generations, communities, and lived experience. Initiated during the Common Thread Festival in St. Louis' Cherokee Street district in June 2026, the project invited participants to respond to a simple prompt: What do you wish you had known about your body, sex, or love? Each participant received a blank quilt square to write, draw, or decorate while sharing stories and conversations with those around them. Individually, the squares hold personal reflections; collectively, they reveal common experiences of curiosity, uncertainty, joy, resilience, and care. The quilt transforms private memories into a shared archive, demonstrating how personal narratives often resonate far beyond the individual. The quilt intentionally remains unfinished. Rather than existing as a completed object, it functions as a living document that continues to expand as new voices are added. Visitors to this exhibition are invited to contribute their own quilt square, becoming collaborators in an artwork that acknowledges knowledge as something continuously built through dialogue, vulnerability, and collective participation. With each addition, Body, Sex, Love grows into a broader record of shared human experience, one that honors the stories we inherit, the lessons we were never taught, and the wisdom we choose to pass forward.
Itsy Bitsy Spider
……..The absence of familial knowledge, emotional continuity, and generational
wealth has become a conceptual framework within my practice, prompting
questions about what is truly passed between generations. I am interested in
how the missing shapes identity as profoundly as what remains. These
questions shift my attention from inheritance to possibility.
My work ultimately asks how one learns to make a home within oneself. Hope
is not an escape from inherited histories but the labor of creating new
realities; an act of creating different futures from the fragments of the past
-Samantha Hunerlach-Tulin