Freddy Marmolejo, senior art and communication double-major specializing in acrylics and photography, will tell you he wasn’t really an artist before he got to Trinity University. Now his work hangs on the wall of the Michael and Noémi Neidorff Art Gallery, blown up large enough for the whole room to see – a frozen moment in time, just the way he likes it.

Marmolejo is one of eight graduating artists featured in “More+Again,” Trinity’s 2026 Senior Capstone Exhibition, on view at the Neidorff Art Gallery in the Jim and Janet Dicke Art Building until May 16.

The show, which opened with a reception on April 23, brings together work from Madeleine Albert, Kassandra Ibarra, Lydia Jacobson, Marmolejo, Rory McCarthy, Kathleen Slansky, Annika Wyatt and Dalex Zenteno. Working across painting, photography, mixed media, textiles and printmaking, the artists explored themes of repetition, ambiguity and uncertainty.

“More+Again” does not organize its artists by medium or theme, but lets the work speak collectively. It’s a mix of graduating voices grappling with what it means to finish something and start something else simultaneously, Douglas Brine, chair of the Department of Art and Art History, said at the opening reception.

For Marmolejo, San Antonio’s art scene was a revelation he said. He came to Trinity without much of an artistic identity, but found one quickly, along with people to support him.

“I love how hustling and bustling it is. I love that people here actually value the art scene,” Marmolejo said, looking around a gallery packed with students, faculty and visitors from the broader San Antonio arts community.

His senior work spans acrylic and photography. To Marmolejo, painting demands time and patience. Photography stops the clock.

“I take photos to immortalize moments,” Marmolejo said. “With this photo, I’m able to freeze this moment in time. You can tell where it is. You can tell what time it is. It’s like a portal.”

The show carries personal weight for Marmolejo beyond the work itself. His piece hangs near Ibarra’s, senior art and communication double-major and close friend since their first year at Trinity. The pairing of their work felt, to him, like something larger than coincidence.

“To be put in the same area in our senior show and in the exhibit, it feels monumental,” he said. “It feels like a full circle moment.”

That sense of reckoning with time runs through the work of Kathleen ‘Katie’ Slansky, senior art major and education minor. Slansky is an oil painter, but months into the process for “More+Again,” she scrapped her original plan.

“The style I was working in before was no longer resonating with me as deeply, and I was looking for change,” Slansky said. “So I got out of my comfort zone and tried something new, experimenting with different ways to put paint on the canvas that wasn’t just a brush.”

The result is a body of work made with fingers, hands, palette knives, oil sticks and the kind of loose, doodling line that feels more like childhood than fine art, she said. That last quality is intentional. Her piece “I Hope My Friends Still Come and Visit Me” hides a private symbol inside its imagery – a unicorn, a reference to her younger sister and a childhood neighbor, visible to everyone but legible only to her.

“Graduation coming up and looking at life post-grad brings up a lot of nostalgia and reflecting on growing up, and that’s what really sparked this piece for me,” Slansky said.

Jon Won Lee, associate professor of art and art history who taught several of the seniors, said that kind of emotional candor in the work did not surprise him — the students’ investment in each other did.

“What surprised me most was seeing them shift from worrying only about their own pieces to genuinely caring about the whole group,” Lee said. “They stepped up to support one another and ensured the entire exhibition was a success.”

Lee said the shared studio space quietly shaped the work itself. Artists making art side-by-side absorbed each other’s ideas and techniques without necessarily meaning to, producing what he called a “beautiful, unintended dialogue” across the show.

“More+Again” perfectly captures the reality of the studio,” Lee said. “Growth doesn’t happen overnight. It comes from that exhausting but beautiful cycle of repetition – making more art, again and again.”