As the city emerges from winter cold, a host of young artists emerge during Spring Gallery Night and Day. The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (MIAD) offers its senior exhibition featuring 145 design and fine art students. Exciting new Latino artists display their work at Walker’s Point Center for the Arts, and the Hotcakes Gallery showcases another six MARN Mentor 2008 award-winners. MIAD’s “2008 Senior Exhibition” features the vividly colored paintings of Brad Conklin, Katie Donoghue’s combinations of photographs and light boxes, Benjamin Rothschild’s sculpted metal toys, Julia Schilling’s dye-on-metal drawings coordinating with cast aluminum sculpture, Boris Ostrelov’s interactive mixed-media pieces, and Colin T. Dickson’s 31/2 Miles to the Center of Somewhere.

Hotcakes Gallery may be preparing to shut down in a couple of months, but the work currently on the walls doesn’t suggest it. This show, at minimum, is great fun for the viewer, who is treated to superb illustration and sculpture at the hands of Portland artists Meredith Dittmar and Betsy Walton. It’s a well-conceived show, with a sense of unity between the two artists, culminating in a collaborative piece that combines Dittmar’s polymer clay figures with Walton’s stoic faces.