A whimsical collection of artwork inspired by Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” is on display at the Alabama School of Math and Science in Mobile, giving students and visitors a look at how one local artist turned a family theater project into a full body of creative work. The exhibit features prints, mobile sculptures and illustrations by Todd Duren, an artist and professor at Spring Hill College who has held a lifelong fascination with Carroll’s classic tale.
The show occupies the gallery space at ASMS, the public residential magnet high school that sits in the heart of Mobile’s midtown district. For the school’s students — teenagers from across Alabama who live and study on campus — the exhibit puts professional work by a working Mobile artist a short walk from their dormitories and classrooms, the kind of daily contact with living art that few high schools can offer.
Carroll’s 1865 novel has invited reinterpretation for more than a century and a half, its dream logic and cast of Eccentric characters — the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts — proving endlessly adaptable to new visual styles. Every generation of artists has found its own Alice, and Duren’s version joins a long line that runs from John Tenniel’s original illustrations through film, stage and gallery treatments of the same material.
From Family Theater to a Body of Work
Duren’s connection to the story began years ago when his family wrote and produced their own theatrical adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland” for their neighborhood, a project that sparked a much larger creative undertaking. Rather than let the material from that production go to waste, Duren reworked it into new forms, eventually publishing his own book and creating a series of prints and sculptures built around the story’s spindly-limbed, off-kilter characters.
The origin story is unusual in the best sense. Most gallery exhibitions grow out of studio practice and academic training; this one grew out of a family, a neighborhood stage and the decision that good material deserves more than one performance. The theatrical roots show in the work itself — Duren’s characters carry the exaggerated gestures and expressive posture of performers mid-scene, as though each print were a still from a play only the family ever staged.
“The same spindly-limbed characters appear in my book, prints and mobile sculptures,” Duren said. “Just like Walt Disney or Tim Burton, I’ve re-imagined the characters in my own style.”
That comparison places Duren’s work alongside two of the best-known reinterpretations of Carroll’s story, both of which have leaned into the tale’s surreal, dreamlike qualities. Disney’s 1951 animated feature softened the tale into Technicolor whimsy for a family audience, while Burton’s 2010 film darkened it into fantasy spectacle. Duren’s version, developed through years of sketching, sculpting and self-publishing, offers a distinctly personal and homegrown take rooted in a family theater project rather than a major studio production.
The Artist Behind the Work
Duren’s day job sits across town from the gallery. As a professor at Spring Hill College, the Jesuit liberal arts college founded in 1830 as the first institution of higher learning in Mobile, he is part of a campus community with a long tradition of visual arts education, and his academic work keeps him in daily conversation with students learning to find their own creative voices.
That dual life — teacher and practicing artist — shows in the exhibit’s accessibility. The work rewards close looking, but it welcomes the casual viewer too: recognizable characters, a playful tone and craftsmanship that reads immediately from across the room. Art aimed at children’s-literature subjects must walk a line between sophistication and simplicity, and the show demonstrates how a practiced hand keeps both audiences in view at once.
The sculptures add a dimension flat images cannot. Mobile sculptures — suspended constructions that shift and turn with the air around them — echo the floating, falling quality of Carroll’s story, where Alice drifts down a rabbit hole and changes size at the story’s whim. Hung in a gallery, they turn the exhibition itself into something kinetic, a nod to the source material’s instability and motion.
Why ASMS
The Alabama School of Math and Science, a public magnet high school in downtown Mobile, regularly hosts art exhibits and community events in its gallery space alongside its academic programs. The school draws talented students from every county in Alabama, housing them on campus for a curriculum heavy in mathematics, science and research — an environment where exposure to the humanities and fine arts is a deliberate complement to the technical course load.
Hosting an exhibit built on a literary classic fits that mission neatly. Carroll was himself a mathematician and logician at Oxford, and “Alice in Wonderland” is peppered with the logic games, riddles and mathematical jokes of its author’s discipline — a fact that gives the show a particular resonance inside a school devoted to STEM. Students who walk through the gallery are looking at the work of an artist who found his material in a book written by a mathematician.
The exhibit also connects the school to the wider Mobile arts community. Gallery shows open to the public bring neighborhood visitors onto the campus, introduce prospective families to the school, and give local artists a well-lit, well-trafficked venue that few private galleries can match in scale.
Visiting the Exhibit
The Duren exhibit is open to visitors Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Those interested in viewing the exhibit or learning more about the school can call 251-441-2100 or visit www.asms.net.
Weekday daytime hours make the show a natural stop for several audiences: Spring Hill students and faculty, Mobile’s downtown and midtown office workers on a lunch hour, home-school families building an arts outing into the school week, and the parents of prospective ASMS applicants touring the campus. Admission to the gallery is free, in keeping with the school’s role as a public institution whose cultural offerings belong to the community that funds it.
For visitors unfamiliar with the school, the exhibit doubles as an introduction. ASMS admissions staff point families to the gallery when they visit, and a show like Duren’s — playful, literary, accessible — sets the tone the school cultivates: rigorous, but hospitable to imagination. The pairing of a science-and-math curriculum with a Carroll-inspired art show makes the point better than any brochure could.
A Local Story Worth the Look
What makes the exhibition distinct among the region’s gallery offerings is its provenance. Museum shows of “Alice” material usually arrive from distant collections; this one was made here, by a Mobile artist, from a project his family staged on a neighborhood stage. The characters on the walls began as costumes and blocking notes and grew into a book, prints and sculpture through years of patient reworking.
The show is also a quiet argument for creative persistence. A family play could have ended with its final performance; instead, the material kept generating new forms. Students at the school — many of them a few years from choosing their own paths — can see in the exhibit what happens when an artist refuses to let a good idea die at the edge of the stage: the idea follows him home, into a studio, and eventually onto the walls of the gallery down the street.
For Mobile, the exhibit adds one more thread to the city’s active visual arts calendar, which spans the Mobile Museum of Art, the galleries of its colleges and universities, and the studio spaces of the artists who live and work across the city. Duren’s Wonderland, grown from a family project into a public exhibition, fits the pattern that keeps the local scene alive — one artist’s long obsession, shared with whoever walks through the door.
The Craft Behind the Characters
Turning one story into three formats — book, print, sculpture — is a demanding exercise in translation. Each medium makes different demands: an illustration must carry a scene in a single frame, a print must survive reproduction and display, and a mobile sculpture must balance in the air, moving gracefully rather than tangling. The shared characters must remain recognizable across all three, which requires the artist to boil each figure down to the essential lines that make it itself.
The spindly limbs Duren describes are exactly that kind of distillation. Exaggerated thinness reads instantly as whimsy and imbalance — the visual vocabulary of a world where nothing obeys normal proportion. It is a choice that serves the story’s tone: Carroll’s Wonderland is a place where sizes shift, rules invert and identity wobbles, and figures that look engineered by a gentle wind suit that world better than realistic anatomy ever could.
Self-publishing the book put the project’s ownership entirely in the artist’s hands, from the drawings to the decision of when it was finished. Independent publishing in the visual arts trades distribution muscle for creative control, and for a deeply personal project grown out of family theater, control was presumably the point. The book also anchors the exhibition, giving visitors who want to go deeper than the gallery walls a version of the story they can take home.
Carroll’s Legacy as Raw Material
The durability of “Alice in Wonderland” as source material is a phenomenon worth noting in itself. The book entered the public domain long ago, which is part of why every era reinvents it — no licensing, no estate approvals, just a story that belongs to everyone. From stage productions to video games, the tale has proven endlessly recyclable precisely because Carroll wrote it as a dream, and dreams tolerate any reinterpretation their dreamers bring.
Duren’s exhibit adds a Mobile chapter to that lineage and demonstrates the pattern by which classics stay alive: each artist who takes them up changes them, and the changes keep the original in circulation for readers who might never open the 1865 text. A student who encounters the Cheshire Cat in a sculpture on campus is only one question away from the book it came from.
That chain — story to family play to book to gallery — also makes the exhibit a case study in how art actually gets made outside the studio myth. Most enduring creative work begins close to home, in ordinary rooms, from projects no one expected to matter. The Wonderland on the walls at ASMS began exactly there, and it is still growing.