Opening Reception March 26, 6-8pm
March 26 - May 9, 2026
Mtn Space is honored to present It Takes YEARS to Grow a Pineapple, Erica Prince’s first major solo exhibition in South Florida. The exhibition features new mixed-media prints and drawings alongside hand-built ceramic sculptures.
Playful, floral, and unapologetically feminine, the exhibition unfolds as a meditation on nature and mono no aware—the tender awareness of impermanence. Marking a pivotal synthesis of Prince’s sculptural and two-dimensional practices, it explores care, time, and regeneration, where floral arrangements become both gesture and metaphor, embodying cycles of bloom, decay, and renewal.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a large ceramic totem, extending her ongoing Containers series—vessels influenced by Dutch tulipieres and retro-futurist architecture that have been featured in Architectural Digest and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Inspired by her home on a former pineapple grove, the sculpture reflects on the years of care, cultivation, and generational effort required for a single pineapple to ripen. It stands as a tribute to slow growth and sustained attention—a counterpoint to the pace of immediacy culture and its demand for constant output.
Prince’s South Florida debut follows years of profound caretaking and teaching that shaped her life after relocating from New York to West Palm Beach in 2019—just before the pandemic. Created in fragments of time while caring for her young daughter, aging parents, and teenage students, these works emerge from the tension between creative urgency and lived responsibility. She incorporates her daughter’s and mother’s spontaneous mark-making into her compositions, collapsing the boundaries between artmaking and caretaking. At a cultural moment newly attuned to invisible labor and burnout, Prince’s work transforms caregiving into both an artistic and political stance, affirming patience and continuity as radical acts.
A closing reception on Mother’s Day weekend will feature a panel discussion on the intersection of artmaking and caretaking, moderated by the artist.
About the Artist
Erica Prince (b. 1985, Toronto, Canada) lives and works in West Palm Beach, Florida. She holds a BFA in Printmaking from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Her multidisciplinary practice spans ceramics, printmaking, drawing, photography, and her ongoing relational project Transformational Makeovers. Prince is a full-time faculty member at A.W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts, where she views teaching as social practice—soft activism rooted in care, connection, and joy. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Canadian Art, Vice, Artsy, and Wallpaper.