GCCC Mercer Gallery to Host Art Exhibition by Brett K. Novack
The Mercer Gallery at Garden City Community College is pleased to present Underlying Beauty, a solo exhibition of paintings by Brett K. Novack, a Garden City native, contemporary Kansas artist, art educator, coach, and GCCC alumnus. The exhibition will open on November 2 and remain on display through December 4, 2026. Gallery hours are Monday–Thursday, 9:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m., and Friday, 9:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
Through a body of nonrepresentational work, Novack explores the intersection of visual abstraction, personal experience, and the complexities of learning with a disability. Drawing upon his experiences as both a student and an educator, he transforms the challenges of learning hardships into a visual language of color, texture, pattern, spatial relationships, and material experimentation.
An artist reception will take place on Friday, November 13 from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. inside the Mercer Gallery in the Pauline Joyce Fine Arts Building. The public is invited to meet Novack and view the exhibition. Garden City Community College will be closed for Thanksgiving Break November 21-29.
In Underlying Beauty, painting becomes a means of making visible experiences that are often difficult to articulate. Novack employs figure-ground reversal, shifting positive and negative space, varied mark-making, and differences in paint viscosity to explore feelings of uncertainty, imbalance, disorientation, and discovery. Layered surfaces and competing visual elements evoke the complexity of processing information, while moments of increased clarity suggest the confidence that can emerge through understanding, perseverance, and the development of effective learning strategies. Rather than illustrating disability through recognizable imagery, Novack uses abstraction to invite viewers into an experience that is personal in origin yet broadly human in its implications.
Born and raised in Garden City, Novack’s artistic journey reflects determination, resourcefulness, and a sustained commitment to education. He received a scholarship to pursue art at Garden City Community College, graduating with high honors in 2017 and earning recognition by being awarded the Most Outstanding Graduate 2017. He continued his studies at Fort Hays State University, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2019, subsequently completed the Transition to Teaching program, and began pursuing his master’s degree. His professional experience includes teaching middle school in Garden City and Holcomb, where he currently teaches and coaches students in grades six through eight at Holcomb Middle School. These experiences inform an artistic practice grounded in the relationship between creative expression, educational access, and the varied ways people experience and understand the world.
The exhibition offers visitors an opportunity to encounter Novack’s work as both a compelling investigation of contemporary painting and a thoughtful reflection on the lived experience of learning differences. His paintings resist easy interpretation, encouraging viewers to slow down, reconsider their assumptions, and discover meaning through close observation. At the heart of Underlying Beauty is the proposition that experiences often perceived as obstacles or deficiencies may also contain unexpected forms of insight, resilience, and creative possibility.
The Mercer Gallery is especially pleased to welcome Novack back to the GCCC campus, where his development as an artist began to take shape. His return underscores the important role community colleges play in supporting emerging artists and demonstrates how artistic inquiry can continue to evolve through education, professional practice, and personal experience. Students, faculty, and community members are invited to engage with the exhibition and learn from an artist whose work connects contemporary studio practice with the meaningful, ongoing work of teaching and learning.
For additional information, contact Mercer Gallery Director Michael Knutson at michael.knutson@gcccks.edu.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Learning new topics is a difficult task, but even more so for a person with any type of learning disability. Learning disabilities cause difficulties in school and in life, but also how that person feels about themselves. This person could feel lost, incomplete, not good enough, not smart enough, and the list never ends. I understand this since I am a person that has dealt with the struggles of learning disabilities. The body of work I began started by working with positive and negative space, or the figure-ground reversal, techniques that require control and others with less control, and differences in paint viscosity to focus on drawing attention to learning disabilities. These areas all reference how a person with a disability can feel, such as lost, not in control, empty, or imbalanced.
My work seems to show how a person that has felt those emotions could experience at any point. The flipping of positive and negative space, or figure-ground reversal, creates a feeling of being lost and being found, or even how a person could feel when too many different parts are competing for attention. While the different uses of techniques create more purposeful marks compared to the ones which seem to be unintended. Using the different thickness of paint, and adding other mediums to the paint, relates to the chemical imbalances people have with learning disabilities. This body of work builds upon those ideas by showing how a person begins to feel once they have been diagnosed with their disability, the lines become more apparent, the details less muddled. It is similar to how one begins to have more tools to be able to work through learning new topics. They feel more confident to be able to apply the tools to help them learn, yet they still have to push through the uncertainty, but they are more determined to move down the path.
By using non-representational artwork, it will allow the work to relate to the minimal overall knowledge of which many people have about learning disabilities. Many people view learning disabilities as misunderstood or abstract, which means they are sometimes hard to explain or understand, similar to my body of work. Each disability has a story to tell, as do each one of these pieces.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Brett K. Novack was born in the windy plains of Garden City, Kansas. Growing up in a family of 14 children, Brett developed a sense of strength and work ethic. For instance, Brett had to be financially independent at the age of 14. He began helping his dad with their family painting business at the young age of 12, which afforded him a budget and financial freedom. Handling many of his own childhood necessities made it difficult to afford college directly out of high school, forcing him to take college courses as he could afford them. In 2015, he was offered a scholarship to study art. He graduated with high honors and most outstanding graduate from Garden City Community College in 2017. Brett transferred to Fort Hays State University and has obtained his Bachelor degree in Fine Arts in 2019, completed the Transition to Teaching program and is currently working towards completing his Master’s Degree.
Brett’s influences include his father, who taught him the basics of color and paint application in the family commercial painting business. His high school art teacher, Archie Oliver, recognized his potential and pushed him to strive for excellence. He is inspired by his older brother, Nathan Novack, a middle school art instructor. Brett is currently teaching 6th to 8th grades at Holcomb Middle School. Brett enjoys creating artwork that shows his love for his wife, makes people laugh, his childlike wonder, and artwork that expresses his biographical connection to learning with dyslexia.
Brett has been a featured artist at Garden City Arts, he has shown in the Student Art Exhibition at Garden City Community College, he has shown in the Dia de los Muertos Exhibition at Garden City Arts, he received an award in Colby’s Art on the Oasis Juried Show, he received an award in Phi Theta Kappa Kansas/Nebraska Regional Conventional Art Show, he has shown at Patrick Dugan’s Coffee Shop for his solo show titled Yarning for Ceramics, and he has artwork exhibited in Garden City Community College Permanent Collection. Brett also won two awards at the Fort Hays State University Student Honors Art Show and one award at the Scholarly and Creative Activities Day.
Through his painting and teaching, Novack continues to explore the relationship between creative expression and lived experience. His work demonstrates how the challenges of learning can become sources of artistic inquiry, opening a space for greater understanding of the many ways people perceive, interpret, and navigate the world.
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