Malls are not where most people expect to find fine art. Multidisciplinary artist and curator Louise Cutler wants to change that.

Inside Outside Art Exhibition — The World Reassembled, Cutler’s new exhibition, is now on view at the Shops at Foothills mall, brings assemblage and installation art out from behind museum walls and into the everyday path of shoppers.

According to its curator, the exhibition gathers artists who work in mediums that don’t frequently get their own spotlight.

“They rarely have an opportunity to show their work because it’s installation and it’s assemblage,” Cutler said.

Cutler, who is based out of Colorado, is best known for figures that are simplified and faceless — forms she said are designed to invite reflection. She is also the founder of the Beauty of Blackness Fine Art Show. Her curatorial resume includes exhibitions at the Museum of Art Fort Collins, the Lakewood Cultural Center and the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art at Colorado State University, where she has served on the board.

For this show, Cutler said she built the concept around a single question: “If you had the ability, how would you reassemble the world?”

That question, she said, grew out of frustration with how people talk about changing the world without acting on it locally.

“The only way you make changes in the world is if you start where you are,” Cutler said. “It’s not just, oh, I hate the politicians, I hate this, I hate that. OK, well then you be nicer to the person next to you.”

Cutler put out an open call for submissions and said she was intentionally generous with acceptances, taking multiple pieces from artists who told her they had never had that many works accepted into a single show before. One contributor, James Dixon, sent a collection of his work that Cutler helped shape into a full installation.

“One of the artists I was talking to — because I accepted all four of his pieces — was like, ‘I never get, like, four pieces accepted; if I do a show, they might take one piece.’” Cutler said.

The show ended up drawing artists from well beyond Colorado, including Ohio and Georgia.

Placing the work in a mall rather than a gallery was deliberate. Cutler said she wanted art to reach people who might never walk into a museum on their own.

“You don’t find art, art finds you,” Cutler said. “I feel you shouldn’t have to look for art. You shouldn’t have to go into a museum.”

To deepen that sense of interaction, Cutler added notepads and pens near the exhibit so visitors could write down their reactions, along with a QR-code-based discovery quest that lets people explore the work online. She said she reads through the notepads in the evenings, when the mall is quiet.

“I’ve had to remove a few penises,” Cutler said. “But other than that, it’s great.”

Cutler is folding similar interactive elements into her other upcoming projects, including her “Dresses with Pockets” exhibit, part of which is currently installed at Denver International Airport, ahead of a full run at the Museum of Art Fort Collins opening in January 2027.

Among the works in The World Reassembled, Cutler pointed to a white art piece marked with a red handprint that addresses Native American displacement and confronts scarcity and wealth, as well as a sculpture built from plastic figures examining microplastics. She described how the show is brought together by artists repurposing existing materials into something new.

“You have all of this recreation of using things that exist in the world, but (you’re) recreating them and redesigning them and reassembling them,” Cutler said.

Underlying the whole project, Cutler said, is a resistance to the idea that art belongs only to a cultured few.

“I feel like sometimes that’s what has happened where you have this elitist status,” Cutler said. “My whole purpose for the things that I do is to bring it here, bring it in our space and (bring) what I’ll call the ‘common man,’ as opposed to the elite.”

She pointed to a past exhibit at the Museum of Art Fort Collins, A Culture Preserved in the Black Experience, as an example of that mission working, saying that attendees told her afterward that the show had given them a voice.

Curating, Cutler said, became part of her own evolution as an artist rather than a separate career.

“When you see something, and you feel that it needs to be changed, then what do you do?” Cutler said. “You work to change it. You don’t wait for somebody else to do it.”

Inside Outside Art Exhibition — The World Reassembled is on view at the Shops at Foothills mall until Sept. 27.

Reach Maci Lesh at entertainment@collegian.com or on social media @macileshmedia.