Exhibits & Events

Gross McCleaf Gallery is proud to present Shifting, a new body of work by Mickayel Thurin. Through painting, text, color, and layered materials, Thurin creates deeply personal works that explore motherhood, spirituality, emotional processing, and self-realignment. Her paintings move between intimate reflection and shared emotional experience, channeling emotional states through saturated color, expressive figures, stitched textures, and handwritten text.

Drawing from shadow work, healing practices, and lived experience, Thurin’s paintings function as both self-portraits and affirmations. Phrases emerge across bodies and backgrounds like internal dialogue, while recurring symbols including eyes, stars, constellations, and fragmented patterns create a visual language rooted in intuition, vulnerability, and transformation.

Rather than resolving emotion into fixed narratives, the works remain open, layered, and in motion. Through collage, acrylic, fabric, paper, and text, Thurin allows contradiction and becoming to coexist, holding fear beside courage, exhaustion beside care, and self-protection beside visibility.

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Join us Saturday, June 6 from 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm for the

Opening Reception and Artist Talk for Mickayel Thuring: Shifting.

The exhibition remains on view through July 11 at Gross McCleaf Gallery.

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Mickayel Thurin is a Haitian American artist whose work explores themes of emotion, spirituality, and the human experience through mixed media. She grew up in the Mid-Atlantic region and earned a BFA and a four-year certificate through the joint program at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, later completing her Master’s at Penn State.

Thurin was the founder of Seen Heard Connected, a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness and providing financial assistance to marginalized communities. She was an artist-in-residence at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and has exhibited work at the Philadelphia International Airport, The Delaware Contemporary, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Woodmere Art Museum, the Saginaw Art Museum, and many local galleries. Thurin and her work have been featured in several publications, on film and TV (WHYY’s Infinite Art Hunt). She has also partnered with Mural Arts, the PMA, the Philadelphia Magic Gardens, DVAA and others to conduct art workshops with the public. She currently has work up at the Rockwood Museum and Park’s We the People, Woodmere’s 83rd Annual, and will have an upcoming solo show, Care, Kin, Perspective, at the Philadelphia Magic Garden later this year.

Thurin lives and works in Philadelphia with her husband, fellow artist Benjamin Passione, and their two sons, Maurice and Maximo. She is represented by Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia.