PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE February 11, 2026
Shoosty Bugs: An Art Infestation – Last Chance to Surrender to Pure Wonder Be- fore March 28 at The Brown Museum (For- merly MOAS)
Daytona Beach, FL – Imagine a museum on the cusp of rebirth, flush with a $150 million gift and still chasing matching dreams for its Crown Jewel Campaign. Now picture three galleries quietly overtaken by something alive, shimmer- ing, and entirely unprompted. *Shoosty Bugs: An Art Infestation* by Stephen Shooster isn’t just an exhibition—it’s an uprising of imagina- tion, a final, defiant bloom of handmade magic before the machines rewrite everything. No AI touched these works. Every curve, every iridescent vein, every impossible pattern began as a single, deliberate dot drawn by hand—Vec- tor-Paintings brought to life through human obsession. Forty-plus of them now dance along- side towering 3D bugs and the museum’s newest dinosaur realm. Silk tapestries—some stretch- ing five panels wide and twenty feet across— seem to breathe, their grade-6A mulberry sur- faces catching light like wings mid-flutter. And then there’s The Volusia County Hopper: a computer-woven homage to cicadas and grass- hoppers that steals an old Americana tapestry pattern from the museum’s own archives and reweaves it into something startlingly alive— machine-guided, yes, but soul-born from one artist’s restless mind.
Learn what Chromatic Fusionism means when it is unleashed: sacred Egyptian scarabs drifting through Miyazaki haze, Ernst Haeckel’s metic- ulous spirals colliding with ancient textiles from distant shores. These bugs aren’t decorative. They’re travelers—mythic wanderers who’ve crossed centuries and continents, collected sto- ries no algorithm could dream, and returned to whisper them across glowing silk. “These bugs are painted with the patterns of the world,” Shooster says, eyes alight. “In an age where art arrives fully formed at the press of a button, mine is coaxed out the hard way—one mischievous stroke at a time—until it erupts into multiple masterpieces of wonder. Come. Step inside three galleries that feel like they’ve been dreaming of you.” This is your last invitation. Before March 28, before the new museum era arrives and the old galleries quiet, come witness what happens when whimsy refuses to fade, when scale be- comes intimate, and when the final great non- AI infestation still has the power to astonish, unsettle, and enchant.
Tickets: moas.org Follow the infestation: @shoosty
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