Four Generations of Yust Art on Display in Downtown Lewisburg

A family show with a downtown Lewisburg anchor

Four generations of the Yust family are filling Artists & Artisans with more than art this week. In downtown Lewisburg, the exhibit Creative Genes, A Family Show turns a cooperative gallery at 229 Market Street into a living family retrospective, where painting, pottery, jewelry and photography sit side by side instead of being separated into separate solo shows.

The exhibition runs April 16 through May 23, 2026, with an opening reception Thursday, April 24, from 5:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Artist talks are set for 6:00 p.m., giving visitors a chance to hear directly from the family whose work is on view. What makes the show stand out is not just the variety of media, but the way it connects a Lewisburg audience to artists whose family story reaches back to Colorado.

What is on display

The gallery’s lineup is straightforward but unusually broad for one family show:

• Paintings by David Yust
• Pottery by Erin Brown
• Jewelry by Joan Yust and Becca Brown
• Photography by Joel Yust

The gallery describes the project as a collaboration featuring four guest artists from Colorado who are related to **Erin Yust Brown, and its listing says the exhibit represents five family members: Joan, Dave, Joel, Erin and Becca**. That gives the show a rare shape for Union County visitors. Instead of a single artistic voice repeated in different rooms, the exhibit shows how one family’s creative identity has branched into different disciplines while staying recognizably connected.

That range matters in a place like Lewisburg, where weekend foot traffic, arts tourism and Bucknell-related activity help shape the downtown rhythm. A visitor can step into one gallery and see abstract painting, handmade jewelry, functional pottery and photography in a single visit, then continue down Market Street to restaurants, shops and other arts spaces.

Dave Yust’s long artistic arc

The clearest bridge between the generations may be **David Yust, known professionally as Dave Yust, whose career gives the show its historical depth. He was born in 1939 in Wichita, Kansas, studied art and design, and later moved to Colorado. He taught painting and drawing at Colorado State University for 47 years, through 2012**, which means his work has influenced not only the family represented in Lewisburg, but also generations of students.

His biography from the U.S. Department of State says that since the early 1960s, his work has explored the tension between geometric and biomorphic, organic imagery. That description helps explain why his paintings can feel both structured and alive, an approach that places him in the conversation of modern and abstract painters who built American art’s visual language through experimentation and discipline.

The event listing for the Lewisburg show quotes Hugh A. Grant, founding director and curator of the Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art, calling Yust “one of the most important” Colorado and regional modern and abstract painters and print artists represented at the museum. The same listing says Yust received the National Art Education Association Award for Pacific region Art Educator of the Year in Higher Education. For Lewisburg visitors, that turns the exhibit into more than a family gathering. It is also a chance to see work by an artist with a substantial teaching legacy and a long record in the regional art world.

His own evolution is visible in the titles of later series. The Department of State biography notes that his Inclusion series began in 1982 and his Chromaxiologic titles began in 2005, showing a practice that kept pushing forward instead of settling into one formula. That history gives added meaning to the family show, because it places the younger generations in dialogue with an artist whose career has already crossed decades, styles and institutions.

Why the family angle matters in Union County

The show’s strongest appeal may be its sense of continuity. The gallery frames the family’s creativity as the result of both nature and nurture, and that idea is easy to feel in the range of work on display. Painting, pottery, jewelry and photography all demand different tools and different habits of attention, yet the exhibition suggests that artistic identity can survive by adapting rather than copying itself across generations.

That is one reason the exhibit fits Lewisburg so well. Artists and Artisans was created in the spring of 2023 as a collaboration among experienced and award-winning artists who wanted to offer their work and engage with the public in downtown Lewisburg. A show like Creative Genes fits that mission neatly: it brings in outside artists, but it also deepens the cooperative gallery’s role as a place where downtown visitors can encounter both skill and story in the same room.

The broader downtown calendar adds to that effect. The Lewisburg Arts Council has paired the exhibit with an April 26 lecture by David Yust, focused on his career as an abstract painter. The lecture listing says Artists & Artisans will be open for an hour before and after the talk, creating a simple way to connect the presentation with the gallery show itself. The council’s calendar also places the lecture in the middle of a busy arts week that includes the Lewisburg Arts Festival on April 25, making the exhibit part of a larger downtown draw rather than a one-night opening.

A second chance to hear the story

For anyone who misses the opening reception, the April 26 lecture offers another entry point. It gives the family show a spoken dimension, especially useful for a career like Dave Yust’s, where the development of abstraction and the movement between geometric and organic forms can be hard to capture in a quick gallery walk. The additional program at the Union County Historical Society Gallery & Museum extends the exhibit beyond Market Street and gives local arts audiences another reason to stay in town.

That network of events is exactly what makes this show feel bigger than a standard gallery opening. In one downtown stretch, visitors can encounter a four-generation family story, a nationally recognized abstract painter, and a cooperative gallery that was built to keep art visible in public life. For Lewisburg, Creative Genes is not just a display of work on the wall. It is a reminder that downtown remains one of the county’s strongest cultural gathering places, especially when family history, local institutions and visiting audiences meet in the same week.