Who Was Carlotta Corpron, the Little-Known Photographer Who Brought the Bauhaus to Texas? https://ift.tt/rM86Zbg

Carlotta Corpron lived her life in the American heartland, far from the bastions of culture in New York or Paris. But in the mid–20th century, she managed to cross paths with some of the most influential names in the avant-garde of the time, bringing the rigor and simplicity of the Bauhaus to small-town Texas. Alfred Stieglitz, whom she met in New York, offered her encouragement for her abstract prints. She worked as László Moholy-Nagy’s assistant for a time, and Hungarian photographer György Kepes became a kind of mentor.

But Carlotta Corpron never reached their international fame. Even among enthusiasts of 20th-century photography, she has remained obscure. Now, Corpron is having her moment, with a major new exhibition devoted to her life and work at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

“Carlotta Corpron: Light Is a Plastic Medium,” on view through March 14, 2027, surveys the six bodies of work Corpron made while living and working in Texas from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. The exhibition centers on 48 prints by Corpron given to the museum by late collector Herbert Lust, as part of a broader series of photography gifts made between 2019 and 2023. Lust believed Corpron was a major talent in avant-garde photography and hoped that the museum might raise her profile.

Hirshhorn curator Betsy Johnson, who organized the exhibition, said she was unfamiliar with Corpron’s work before the gift. However, she was immediately captivated by the quality of her photographs, which use light as a tool to create daring abstract forms.

“We saw the work and immediately fell in love with it too,” Johnson said during a recent conversation. “It was incredibly strong, incredibly beautiful work. The vision is something you feel immediately.”

Corpron’s early life

Born in Blue Earth, Minnesota, in 1901, Corpron moved to India at four, where her father worked as a missionary surgeon. She later credited the loneliness of her Himalaya mountain boarding school there with strengthening her independence. In 1920, she returned to the United States, studying art education in Michigan, and earned a master’s degree at Columbia’s Teachers College in 1926. “From the early days, my mother encouraged me to think in terms of a career instead of marrying,” she later said. “I never married, and I never wanted to. I was liberated long before the women’s movement.”

She would take teaching positions in Michigan, Alabama, and Ohio. In 1933, while working in Cincinnati, she bought a Rolleiflex camera. She hoped to photograph plants and flowers as inspiration for her students’ textile design, but she quickly began using it as a medium in its own right. Her first series, “Nature Studies,” which she started in 1933, evinced her interest in light, with photographs of sunlight falling through Venetian blinds across flowers or clouds pictured through shadowy angles.

Corpron’s Bauhaus influences

In 1935, Corpron moved to Denton, Texas, to teach at what was then Texas State College for Women. She had taken a summer photography course in Los Angeles but found it stultifying, with assignments to photograph landmarks such as bridges and courthouses. In 1940, she took the Rolleiflex to the Denton fairgrounds at night and moved the camera while the shutter was open. The swooping lines of carnival lights became her “Light Drawings.”

In the summer of 1942, Moholy-Nagy was invited to teach a light workshop in Denton, and Corpron, who was inspired by his approaches, worked as his assistant, teaching students to make photograms and paper light modulators. Yet she felt that Moholy-Nagy didn’t see her as a truly experimental photographer. “He didn’t understand my need, my desperate need to work and to do something original in photography,” Corpron later recalled.

Two years later, György Kepes spent a year in Denton finishing his book Language of Vision. Corpron sought him out as a mentor, and he agreed to meet with her weekly, urging her to keep pushing her work “until I photographed light instead of paper.” In 1945, Corpron traveled to New York to show Stieglitz her portfolio, who said the work opened “a new world.” Stieglitz died the next year, but Georgia O’Keeffe returned the prints to Corpron with a note that read, “He would want you to go on.”

Sculpting with light

In the mid-1940s through 1950, Corpron reached the height of her productivity with her “Space Compositions” series of eggs, shells, and marbles against mirrored trays and curved reflectors that distorted their forms. She preferred the morning light, working before 7 a.m., or in a small darkroom lit by a single 40-watt bulb, exposing these arrangements for a minute or two. “I didn’t plan to do anything but let the light guide me,” she said of these works. “It was more or less an exploration into the unknown.”

Her “Fluid Light Designs” series took these experiments further. She bent and creased transparent plastic sheets so light scattered across them. As Johnson writes in her catalogue essay, with the camera steady she finally captured light’s movement directly on the negative. In a 1962 article, Corpron summed up her approach, writing, “Light is a plastic medium capable of creating abstract designs of extraordinary beauty and interest.”

The legacy of Carlotta Corpron

While Corpron offered powerful photographic force, her career was unfortunately short-lived. She met with recognition in her lifetime with a solo show at the Dallas Museum of Art in 1948. Her work also appeared in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Abstraction in Photography” exhibition in 1951.

However, even by the artist’s own account, most of her best work dates from 1945 to 1952. By 1955, she could no longer work in darkrooms due to illness. “She just doesn’t have the longevity," she said of her fall into obscurity. Her distance from the art world’s major centers quickened her fade to obscurity, though in 1975, she was included in a survey of women photographers at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, followed by a retrospective at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in 1980.

Still, the exhibition argues, Corpron’s influence endured through the work of her students, including photographers Ida Lansky and Barbara Maples, whose works are described as Texas Bauhaus. “Her students were her creative community,” said Johnson. She also sees Corpron’s work as speaking to ideas that other artists picked up 20 years later. “I think a lot about her work as prefiguring later Light and Space artists like James Turrell and Robert Irwin,” said Johnson.

Johnson hopes the exhibition, which is accompanied by a catalogue, will bring new attention to Corpron’s career.

“The power of following one’s vision and interests is really present in this show,” said Johnson. “In this day and age, her work offers an appreciation for curiosity, for where it can lead a person, how it can be a driving force and an organizing factor in a life.”

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The 10 Best Booths at Art Basel Paris 2026 https://ift.tt/Lk6bDQA

Paris rarely does things by halves. As Art Basel Paris returned for its fifth edition, the city was still reckoning with a weekend of widespread protests over living costs and public services, some of which descended into clashes, looting, and violence. Heightened security surrounded the fair, and some collectors reportedly reconsidered their travel plans. Yet inside the soaring glass-and-steel halls of the Grand Palais, the mood was decidedly upbeat, with busy aisles, ambitious presentations, and collectors seemingly eager to do business.

“This opening afternoon has been very strong, and collectors came ready to make decisions quickly,” said gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac. “Despite any worries about the demonstrations, some deciding not to travel to Paris, we already feel that it’s the most international art fair of the year.”

There was plenty to support that optimism. Hauser & Wirth reported two major sales in the region of $10 million each: Gerhard Richter’s Rokokotisch (Rococo Table) (1965) and Georg Baselitz’s Der Hirte (The Shepherd) (1965). These heavyweight transactions provided a strong early indication of collector appetite.

Under new director Karim Crippa, this year’s edition features 211 galleries from 41 countries and territories, including 32 newcomers. Its expanded footprint includes a new entrance and a larger Premise sector, dedicated to historically overlooked artistic practices, while public artworks spill out onto the streets surrounding the Grand Palais.

For Crippa, the guiding principle this year is “desire.” In an interview with Artsy ahead of the fair, he described his ambition to cultivate “the desire to discover new work that you haven’t been confronted with before,” while positioning Art Basel Paris as a cultural rendezvous that extends beyond the art market.

Now in its second year, Art Basel Paris’s Avant Première day—an exclusive early preview for invited collectors and VVIPs ahead of the fair’s official VIP opening—felt noticeably busier than its debut. American accents were particularly conspicuous among the international crowd filling the Grand Palais, though the atmosphere remained measured rather than frenzied. “Today was busier than last year, but the pace felt calmer,” Nicolas Nahab, co-founder of art advisory NG Partners, told Artsy. “Collectors are taking time to look closely and reconnect with why they collect, which is very healthy.”

Beyond the fair, Paris is buzzing with major museum exhibitions, standout gallery shows, and a constellation of satellite fairs, giving visiting collectors plenty of reasons to extend their stay.

Here are Artsy’s 10 best booths from the fair.

Selma Feriani Gallery

Booth 1.K4

With works by M’barek Bouhchichi, Jellel Gasteli, Jessica Boubetra, Sebastián Espejo, Nadia Nejma Ayari, Monia Ben Hamouda, Baya, Sara Ouhaddou, Nidhal Chamekh, Elena Damiani, Aymen Mbarki, and Yann Lacroix.

Paintings, sculptures, and photography fill Selma Feriani’s booth, where 12 artists explore themes of cultural memory, identity, and the natural world.

Among the highlights is Jessica Boubetra’s Hybrid Orders I (2025), a towering column of glazed stoneware and lacquered steel: These twisting, biomorphic forms are otherworldly. Nearby, M’barek Bouhchichi’s Stick charts 2 (2025), made from brass casts of eucalyptus branches and cowrie shells, references histories of migration and trade across North Africa. A quieter counterpoint comes from Jellel Gasteli’s intimate black-and-white photographs of Mediterranean gardens, taken around 1980, which transform dense foliage into studies of light and shadow.

Elsewhere, Chilean artist Sebastián Espejo presents tactile still-life paintings. Incorporating unconventional materials such as crushed seashells, marble dust, mica, and cold wax, his still lifes of bottles, glasses, and other everyday objects are richly textured and almost sculptural. Prices range from €4,000 ($4,500) to €40,000 ($44,900).

Xavier Hufkens

Booth 0.B25

With works by Alice Neel, Sherrie Levine, Nicolas Party, Tatiana Trouvé, Sterling Ruby, Thomas Houseago, Richard Aldrich, Charline von Heyl, Lesley Vance, Qiu Xiaofei, Louise Bourgeois, and Nathanaëlle Herbelin

At Xavier Hufkens’s booth, some of Art Basel Paris’s VIP visitors were spotted taking a well-earned rest on Tatiana Trouvé’s enormous Sitting Sculpture (2024). Measuring more than three meters long, the painted aluminum bench resembles a series of pale, crumpled sheets draped over rough stone supports, with ragged edges and darkened crevices. It’s the centerpiece of the Brussels gallery’s refreshingly spacious booth, where each work has plenty of room to breathe.

Outside the booth, Sterling Ruby’s FLOWER (9203) (2026) offers another unusual take on a familiar form. The ceramic wall sculpture of a weathered blossom—its lumpy petals covered in cracked, mottled glazes of blue, green, and earthy brown—reflects Ruby’s longstanding fascination with material transformation and industrial forms.

Among the quieter works is Nathanaëlle Herbelin’s Boys, man (2026), a small, softly rendered painting depicting two figures grappling on a mattress, seemingly caught in a playful tussle. Elsewhere, works by Alice Neel, Nicolas Party, and Sherrie Levine round out the presentation.

“There’s something about Paris: its contradictions, its restless energy, its ability to surprise you at every turn,” gallery founder Xavier Hufkens told Artsy. “Fluctuat nec mergitur [Rocked by the waves, but never sunk], as the city’s motto goes. It feels particularly fitting this week.” The booth also saw brisk opening-day sales, led by a painting by Charline von Heyl for $475,000.

Mennour

Booth 0.B32

With works by Ugo Rondinone, Lee Ufan, Alicja Kwade, Tavares Strachan, Théo Mercier, Mohamed Bourouissa, Daniel Buren, Anish Kapoor, Yayoi Kusama, Germaine Richier, Manoucher Yektai, Francis Picabia, Sonia Delaunay, Alexander Calder, Lucio Fontana, Félix Vallotton, and Henri Matisse

Towering above the surrounding booths at the Grand Palais, Ugo Rondinone’s monumental stone figure the angelic (2024) makes Mennour’s presentation hard to miss. Composed of roughly hewn, stacked stone blocks, the sculpture resembles a prehistoric sentinel, observing the throngs of VIPs beneath it. Behind the figure hangs Manoucher Yektai’s Untitled (1962), a vigorous abstract painting whose thick, sweeping strokes of blue, green, and white offer a lively contrast to Rondinone’s imposing stone forms.

“It’s always a pleasure to be back at the Grand Palais, in our city!” founder Kamel Mennour told Artsy. “This year, we divided our booth into two parts, one contemporary with artists such as Alicja Kwade, Tavares Strachan, [and] Théo Mercier, and one with master artists from the 20th century such as Francis Picabia, Alexander Calder, and Henri Matisse.”

A standout of the contemporary section is Kwade’s Siège du Monde (2026), an enormous sphere of pale blue-and-white stone that rests precariously on a wooden chair, its monumental weight at odds with the delicate furniture beneath it. Nearby, Anish Kapoor’s Random Triangle Mirror (2026)—a reflective stainless steel work—proved a magnet for visitors taking kaleidoscopic selfies, their faces and surroundings fractured into distorted reflections.

There were plenty of highlights in the historical section’s impressive roster of modern masters, too. Among them is Sonia Delaunay’s Rythme couleur (1973), a vibrant geometric painting of colorful intersecting curves that exemplifies her fascination with the interplay of shape and hue. Together, the two sections offer a compelling dialogue between modern and contemporary art—a fine example of what Art Basel does best. Prices for works at the booth start at €250,000 ($281,000) and rise to more than €2 million ($2.25 million).

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery and Jeffrey Deitch

Booth 0.A48

With works by Beauford Delaney and Alteronce Gumby

More than seven decades after Beauford Delaney moved from New York to Paris in 1953, a remarkable selection of his paintings has returned to the French capital. At Art Basel Paris, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery and Jeffrey Deitch have joined forces to present a survey of the American artist’s work, tracing its evolution from expressive cityscapes to luminous abstractions, alongside new works by contemporary artist Alteronce Gumby.

Among the highlights of Delaney’s works is Untitled (Greene Street) (1950), a richly textured New York streetscape that captures his early modernist style. By contrast, Chartres (1954), painted shortly after his arrival in France, shows his shift to abstraction. Inspired by visits to Chartres Cathedral and its stained-glass windows, the painting marks a pivotal moment in his development. Elsewhere, Untitled (Yellow Light Swirling) (ca. 1962) exemplifies Delaney’s mature style, with radiant yellow brushstrokes dissolving recognizable forms, such as branches, into a shimmering field of color.

Speaking to Artsy, Michael Rosenfeld traced Delaney’s fascination with light to his early artistic encounters with Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh. In Monet, he explained, Delaney found an “extraordinary lyrical, spiritual, uplifting quality of light,” Rosenfeld said. “When he arrives in France, he really starts to paint these abstractions, which distill nature and light.” For Delaney, Rosenfeld explained, the pursuit was as much spiritual as artistic: “He’s after an ecstatic light, a sense of God, you might even say.”

The presentation brings Delaney’s paintings into dialogue with eight new works by Gumby, whose glittering compositions incorporate gemstones, mirrors, and resin. Prices for Delaney’s paintings range from approximately $400,000 to $4.5 million, with works on paper starting at $160,000.

MASSIMODECARLO

Booth 0.B19

With works by Carsten Höller, Matthew Wong, Yan Pei-Ming, Sanford Biggers, Elmgreen & Dragset, and France-Lise McGurn

A curtain and a prominent safety warning stand before MASSIMODECARLO’s booth, where an installation by Carsten Höller awaits visitors willing to brave its flashing lights. Inside, 7,8 Hz (Vitrine With Golden Fly Agaric Mushrooms) (2019) brings together gleaming gold-colored mushrooms arranged on a stepped red display, accompanied by a disorienting flickering light. Certainly one way to awaken a sleep-deprived VIP.

Elsewhere, the booth flits between fine examples from the stalwart gallery’s roster. On the booth’s exterior, Sanford Biggers’s Unsui (Duet) (2026) features two cloud-shaped sculptures made from shimmering sequins and felt. Hanging above visitors on the booth’s wall is Elmgreen & Dragset’s The Critic (Trompe-l’oeil) (2026), a painted wooden vulture sculpture that looks vaguely menacing from below. On the back wall, several paintings stand out, including France-Lise McGurn’s luminous large-scale Big Plans (2026), and Yan Pei-Ming’s L’Exécution de l’empereur Maximilien, après Manet (2026). The latter revisits Édouard Manet’s famous execution scene, depicting revolutionary soldiers firing their rifles at Mexico’s Emperor Maximilian, here rendered in a red-pink palette that emphasizes the scene’s violence. A quieter but equally arresting highlight is Matthew Wong’s Shaft of Light (2016), a small, tender painting depicting a dark woodland interrupted by a diagonal beam of pale pink light.

“We usually do our best for Paris, because we think that now is the most important European fair,” founder Massimo De Carlo told Artsy, noting that the gallery strives to bring a representative selection regardless of scale. “Paris deserves our best selection.” Works are priced “largely” between €50,000 ($56,200) and €250,000 ($280,800), according to the gallerist, with the Wong painting approaching $1 million.

Sprüth Magers

Booth 0.A22

With works by Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Walter Dahn, Sylvie Fleury, John Baldessari, Frank Stella, George Condo, Rosemarie Trockel, Kara Walker, Louise Lawler, Arthur Jafa, Ed Ruscha, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Alighiero Boetti, Donald Judd, Anne Imhof, Cyprien Gaillard, Hyun-Sook Song, Lucy Dodd, Henni Alftan, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Scheibitz, Michail Pirgelis, David Salle, Kaari Upson, and Salvo.

Visitors entering the Grand Palais are immediately confronted by Barbara Kruger’s enormous vinyl print Untitled (Forget to remember) (2024), its stark black-and-white lettering reading “forget to remember” mounted on the exterior of Sprüth Magers’s booth. The wordplay continues just beyond it, where Sylvie Fleury’s painting pleasures (1990) repeats its titular word across alternating black and pink stripes. Meanwhile, Fleury’s sculpture Patrick & Piet & Josef (I) (1996) presents a pair of white slingback heels accented in red, blue, and black on a low pedestal whose colored planes nod to Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers. Sharp and stylish, the works open on the booth’s themes of branding and desire.

The display feels particularly timely given the strong institutional presence of two of the gallery’s leading artists across Paris. Kruger has created a monumental installation for the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce, while Jenny Holzer is the subject of “J’ai vu,” a major exhibition opening this week at the Musée d’Orsay.

At the fair, Holzer’s work IF YOU ARE CONSIDERED USELESS… (1983) is on view, an early spray-painted canvas that emerged from her collaborations with New York graffiti artists, including Lady Pink. Gallery co-founder Philomene Magers explained that Holzer’s celebrated “Truisms” began as printed statements pasted onto city walls, bringing her into contact with the graffiti scene. The painting belongs to a “very, very, very small group of works,” Magers told Artsy, describing it as a “really important early work” by the artist.

Elsewhere, other works from the gallery’s hefty roster are present in their full glory, from George Condo’s paintings of psychologically charged figures to John Baldessari’s works that play with found imagery and visual juxtaposition. Prices for works in the booth range from €16,000 ($18,000) to €2.85 million ($3.2 million).

kó

Booth 0.P10

With works by Uche Okeke, Obiora Udechukwu, and El Anatsui

Three generations of Nigerian modernism come together at kó’s thoughtfully curated presentation in the fair’s Premise sector dedicated to historical surveys. The Lagos-based gallery brings together works by Uche Okeke, Obiora Udechukwu, and El Anatsui, tracing the development of the influential Nsukka School, which emerged at the University of Nigeria in the decades following the country’s independence in 1960.

At the heart of the presentation is the concept of “Natural Synthesis,” developed by Okeke, who sought to combine European modernist techniques with indigenous Nigerian artistic traditions. Particularly influential was uli, an Igbo form of body and wall painting traditionally practiced by women, characterized by flowing, rhythmic lines and organic shapes.

“He wanted to incorporate the techniques and the styles they were learning, but to tell their own stories,” gallery director Joseph Gergel told Artsy, explaining how Okeke and his peers challenged the Western-focused art education of colonial-era Nigeria.

Among the highlights is Okeke’s Return of the Refugees (1967), which addresses the displacement caused by the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s. The conflict also shaped the work of his student Udechukwu, whose compositions employ the sinuous lines of uli to depict figures, landscapes, and scenes of collective hardship.

Elsewhere, a wood sculpture by Anatsui departs from the shimmering bottle-cap tapestries for which he is best known. Created using a chainsaw to carve deep incisions into the wood, the work reflects his interest in destruction, transformation, and material experimentation. Prices for works at the booth range from €60,000 ($67,400) to €205,000 ($230,000).

Mai 36 Galerie

Booth 0.B51

With works by Jacopo Benassi, Irma Blank, Maia Ruth Lee, Magali Reus, Peter Hujar, John Baldessari, Matt Mullican, Rémy Zaugg, Robert Mapplethorpe, Luigi Ghirri, HR Giger, Magnus Plessen, Stephan Balkenhol, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Roe Ethridge, Flavio Garciandía, Raphael Hefti, Poppy Jones, Kentaro Kawabata, Gowoon Lee, Thomas Ruff, Hiroki Tsukuda, Daan Van Golden, Leon Xu, and Robert Ryman.

A row of five unusual photographic assemblages by Jacopo Benassi lines the exterior of Mai 36 Galerie’s booth. Each combines a black-and-white close-up photo of a thorny branch with painted botanical imagery, mounted within a shallow wooden box and held together by metal straps. The works look precariously assembled, a combination of photography, painting, and sculpture.

“He brings the medium to a completely new level, to a sculptural level,” gallery director Giorgio Dazzo told Artsy, describing Benassi as one of the Zürich-based gallery’s newest additions. “You always have this kind of fragility in his work,” he said, adding that the constructions appear as though moving one element might cause the whole thing to fall apart. The works are priced at €10,000 ($11,200) each.

Inside, the presentation balances longstanding artists in the gallery’s program with newer voices. A highlight is works from Irma Blank’s “Radical Writings” series, in which dense, repeated marks transform writing into abstraction. Nearby, Magali Reus’s Clementine (Full House) (2024) transforms the familiar form of a glass jar into a sculpture fashioned from plaster, aluminum, and steel. Elsewhere, Luigi Ghirri’s quiet photographs depict scenes such as a sunlit courtyard and a solitary table.

Tucked away is a quieter room dedicated to what the gallery calls “artists’ artists,” bringing together influential figures including Peter Hujar, John Baldessari, Matt Mullican, and Rémy Zaugg. Lurking in a nook is a painting by H.R. Giger, whose mid-century biomechanical imagery is still strikingly contemporary today.

ATHR

Booth 1.H3

With works by Ayman Yusri Daydban, Abdulrahman Al Soliman, Mohammed Al Faraj, Rami Farook, and Sarah Abu Abdallah

Saudi Arabian gallery ATHR brings together several generations of artists from the Gulf, mixing established figures with newer additions to its program. Here, Ayman Yusri Daydban’s mixed-media assemblages incorporate found imagery, Arabic text, and references to popular culture. One, for example, arranges decorated tissue boxes on top of each other, with vintage portraits and printed lettering. “He’s one of the artists that we started with when we opened the gallery in 2008, and he still is [with us],” gallery founder Mohammed Hafiz told Artsy.

Elsewhere, Sarah Abu Abdallah’s intimate collages draw on everyday life in Saudi Arabia. One combines a photograph of sliced watermelon with a feather emerging from a heart-shaped object, while another layers torn photographic imagery with Arabic and English text reading “But animals don’t understand poetry!”

The presentation also includes works by Abdulrahman Al Soliman dating to 1991, made in response to the Gulf War, alongside pieces by a younger generation of artists including Mohammed Al Faraj. “For the first time, the gallery is working with estates and kind of modern artists,” Hafiz explained, reflecting ATHR’s expanding focus beyond contemporary art. Prices range from approximately $4,000 to $30,000.

Danysz Gallery

Booth 0.P12

With works by Futura

Long before graffiti became a fixture of the contemporary art world, Futura was helping to redefine the form on the streets of New York. Danysz Gallery presents a rare selection of the American artist’s works spanning four decades, including several important paintings from the early 1980s that have rarely been exhibited.

Unlike the lettering and figurative imagery traditionally associated with graffiti, Futura developed a distinctive abstract language of sharp lines, floating forms, and atmospheric bursts of spray paint. Pony (1982), for example, is a vibrant composition of swirling reds, pinks, and oranges, punctuated by electric-blue marks and looping white lines.

“He was one of the first to go totally abstract,” gallery founder Magda Danysz told Artsy. “Some [of the works] are from the ’80s, and have not been seen for ages.” The rarity of these works has prompted excitement among longtime admirers, she added: “People who know his work are like, ‘Wow, these I’ve only seen in books.’”

The presentation feels particularly fitting in Paris, a city with which Futura has a longstanding connection (the Eiffel Tower makes an appearance in one work on view). In 1981, he struck up a relationship with British punk band The Clash, subsequently joining their European tour and painting live onstage during performances. “There is a love story between Futura, Europe, and even more so Paris,” Danysz said. Major paintings from the 1980s are priced around €200,000 ($224,700).

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Major London museums team up for South Asian arts festival in June 2027. https://ift.tt/OjcuzDY

Serendipity Arts, the Indian nonprofit behind South Asia’s largest multidisciplinary arts festival, will launch a London edition from June 19th through 27th, 2027. The festival will be organized in partnership with the Great Exhibition Road Festival, led by Imperial College London, and a roster of London institutions including the Science Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), Natural History Museum, Royal Albert Hall, Royal Geographical Society, Royal College of Music, Royal College of Art, and the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851.

Programming will take place throughout South Kensington, including galleries, concert halls, cafés, foyers, and outdoor spaces.

The festival will bring established South Asian artists and diaspora talent into dialogue with its partner institutions’ collections and expertise across art, science, music, film, and design, with London’s South Asian communities positioned at the center of the programming.

An intergenerational, all-women curatorial team is leading the festival, including Veeranganakumari Solanki, Nancy Adajania, Latika Gupta, Preethi Athreya, Sneha Khanwalkar, and Elizabeth Yorke.

“It’s an incredibly timely collaboration, setting the stage for the museum’s upcoming focus on the region, with V&A East Museum’s spring 2027 exhibition ‘South Asia Now: Fashion. Art. Design.’ and spring 2028 reopening of the South Asia Gallery at South Kensington,” said Kristian Volsing, senior curator at the V&A South Kensington, "I hope the festival will bring an exciting moment of cross-cultural exchange, creating a vibrant, immersive experience for our audiences at the V&A.”

The London launch builds on a pilot exchange in June 2026, when Serendipity Arts presented two public projects with the Science Museum and Great Exhibition Road Festival, including नैनन की ठगी / Eyes Shall Deceive, a film, music, and sound work by Sneha Khanwalkar and artist Sudarshan Shetty, and Giants on the Move, a puppet and percussion piece staged with the Ishara Puppet Theatre Trust.

London partners will also contribute to Serendipity Arts Festival’s 11th edition in Panjim, Goa, this December. Founded in 2016, the Goa festival marked its 10th anniversary last December and has drawn more than 1 million visitors while supporting more than 10,000 artists through free, citywide programming. “For over a decade, Serendipity Arts has created spaces for South Asian artists to experiment, exchange ideas, and find new ways of experiencing culture,” said Sunil Kant Munjal, founder and patron of Serendipity Arts. “Bringing that vision to London…marks a significant new chapter for us.”

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Why Prune Nourry is Sculpting These Forgotten Women Artists https://ift.tt/c4w5VyX

In 2012, New York–based French artist Prune Nourry began spending long stretches in China. There, she started working with artisans on “Terracotta Daughters” (2012–2030), a response to gender selection in the country: 108 life-size clay sculptures modeled on eight orphan girls. The series was exhibited worldwide before being buried in 2015 at a secret Chinese location, awaiting its excavation in 2030.

It’s typical of Nourry’s work, which is rooted in clay but also includes large installations and collaborative international projects. Her subject is women’s fates in an age of fast-moving science, from sex selection to genetic engineering, and the women history forgets or mistreats. To explore these ideas, she turns to multiple disciplines, enlisting ethnologists, geneticists, archaeologists, and artisans.

She learned the value of building creative relationships in her own flesh 10 years ago, when breast cancer sent her from specialist to specialist in search of the “whole picture, not only of the whole body but also of the soul,” she told Artsy. Inspired by the figure 8 for its symbolism across many cultures, she often echoes that number in her series. This fall, the artist is bringing these themes together, considering a chapter of sculpture’s history that was left out with a new commission at the Petit Palais during Paris Art Week 2026.

For “Visionaries,” Nourry spent time in the museum’s collections with the exhibition’s curator, Sixtine de Saint-Léger, then began 18 months’ research with four art historians. It turned out that only 4 percent of the works had been made by women, and among those, only four were sculptors. A statistic in stark contrast with the many representations of women as models, especially nudes, throughout the museum. “I asked myself if women artists really didn’t exist or if it was a matter of the way they were considered, and what would happen if we changed our perspective?”

Across her career, Nourry has focused on sculpting female figures to draw attention to their plight. And she likes to think for the long term. “We live in times where everything is accelerated, with this impression of sprinting constantly. But sculpting takes time,” she said. Next year she will unveil Les Vénus dionysiennes (2024–present), a public commission at Saint-Denis Pleyel station in Paris, in collaboration with architect Kengo Kuma: 108 sculptures of women evoking Paleolithic representations. “The project started three years ago, but it’s meant for longer than that,” she said, adding that duration also applies to relationships, since she values trust and the search for meaning. Every project, she said, “has to make sense not only for me, but for the people who are experiencing it.”

In 2024, Nourry co-founded the Catharsis Arts Foundation with Claude Grunitzky. Its founding project, “Statues Also Breathe,” is a series of 108 terra-cotta portraits of the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014 made in collaboration with 108 Nigerian students. Like all her projects, it relies on collaboration, combined disciplines, and duration. “Artists are to society what dreams are to the brain,” she said. “They keep society sane, translating messages through symbols, keys to the collective unconscious and the mysteries of life.”

Her homage at the Petit Palais is 18 busts in plaster and marble, of women sculptors who lived in Paris between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “It was a lot of pressure, especially in terms of interpretation,” she said. She had very few archival images to work from, mostly official portraits where expressions and poses are stern. Together with the historians, she looked at the women’s life stories and choices, thinking through three themes: motherhood, social engagement, and healing. Some are barely known. Others, like Sarah Bernhardt and Camille Claudel, are already famous. All of them aren’t talked about enough. Here are a few of them.

Hélène Bertaux

(1825–1909)

An encounter with a sculpture by Bertaux in the collections of the Petit Palais is probably what birthed the whole project, Nourry explained. Bertaux advocated for women’s right to public education and founded the Union of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1881. “It was at once surprising and splendid, realizing that I had never heard of her and had never studied her in school, yet it was thanks to her that I was able to attend school at all.”

Jane Poupelet

(1874–1932)

A fervent feminist and antiestablishment figure, Poupelet began her career under the male pseudonym Simon de la Vergne. She is best known for her bronze female nudes, which celebrated bodies free of the corset. She is also known for making prosthetics for disfigured World War I veterans, as noted by Nourry who mentioned that Poupelet: “created masks for Les Gueules Cassées [broken faces].”

Selma Hortense Burke

(1900–1995)

“I made an exception to our [mostly 19th century] time bracket by adding a portrait of Selma Hortense Burke,” said Nourry. “I love her work, and I thought it was fascinating that an African American woman was making sculptures at the time, and was recognized for it.” Burke is known for her portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin Roosevelt. “She was also making sculptures of babies, there is this extraordinary photo of her where she’s seen in her studio making a sculpture of an infant, and the likeness is so surprising it’s hard to tell which is which,” added Nourry.

Jingyuan Wang

(1884 or 1893–ca. 1970)

Nourry was taken with the work of Jingyuan Wang, a pioneering Chinese sculptor celebrated for her nudes of both men and women, a groundbreaking and controversial choice for a woman artist in 1920s China. “Her work is remarkable! When I look at it I see flesh. Her technique is extraordinary, and beyond technique, her sculptures exude life. It’s crazy that there is so little information about her, even though she was quite recognized at the time. She studied in Lyon then got a scholarship and went to Paris. Back in China she was a professor in Beijing,” said Nourry.

Sarah Bernhardt

(1844–1923)

A famous actress, Sarah Bernhardt was also a painter and, as is even less well known, practiced sculpture for 20 years. She successfully exhibited accomplished marble works at the Paris Salon and even in London. Nourry and the researchers were most interested in her relationship to motherhood—one of the lenses used to study these biographies along the themes of “care/healing” and “social engagement”: “Despite having a son whom she loved deeply, she managed to have a great career, leaving him for months with family while on tours,” said Nourry, adding that it proved mothers at that time could also have careers.

Camille Claudel

(1864–1943)

Although well known for her work today, Camille Claudel struggled to keep her career afloat while in a relationship with Auguste Rodin, whom she also worked for as a studio assistant. Despite showing great promise since her teens, letters found by Nourry’s team show that she was regularly asking her gallerists and her brother for financial help.

Berthe Girardet

(1861–1948)

Born in Marseille, France, into the city’s grande bourgeoisie, Berthe Girardet severed ties with her family’s tradition in the trading business to become a sculptor and trained academically in Marseille and Paris. She was recognized for her portraits of common people and of her loved ones. “She lost her son at war, which deeply influenced her work: she made many sculptures on the theme of motherhood,” said Nourry.

Cléopâtre Bourdelle Sévastos

(1882–1972)

The exhibition includes three hollow, concave portraits. These are allegorical references to groups of women from this period, like the art students, women committed to mental institutions that Nourry tried to imagine, and those Nourry calls the “legacy women,” who dedicated their lives to their husbands’ careers. For this last group, Nourry chose to represent Cléopâtre Bourdelle Sévastos, a promising sculptor who gave up her craft to run her husband’s studio instead, and did so “with a master’s hand,” said Nourry.

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Meet the Contemporary Women Artists Reimagining Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Art https://ift.tt/sjFLzuE

A couple appears making love on an appliquéd patchwork quilt that takes up half a painting’s surface. At the center of the quilt is a tulip, a symbol of faith rebirth that’s popular in Pennsylvania Dutch folk art. Towards the bottom of the panel, one figure’s bare back appears, emblazoned with winged tattoos. Two hands grasp the shoulders, and a bare leg wraps around its waist. On the wall behind the headboard hang two framed folk art pieces—a geometric sampler and a pastoral scene.

This Anne Buckwalter painting, titled Angels (2026), exemplifies the artist’s characteristic juxtaposition of contemporary sexuality and regional folk art traditions. Now based in Maine, Buckwalter was raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Her family’s Swiss German roots go back to the late 1700s or 1800s. “In my work, the blending of these Pennsylvania Dutch aesthetics with elements of sexuality and kink and queerness feels very personal to me,” the artist said during a recent conversation. “I think about the home as a psychological space, a place where these very intimate dramas can play out and also where contradictory elements can live together in harmony.”

The term “Pennsylvania Dutch” alone can breed a sense of confusion, conjuring visions of Mennonites, the Amish, and rural life, austerity, and mythology at once.“There’s a lot of muddied knowledge about this particular regional culture,” acknowledged Buckwalter.

Night House (Kitchen), 2026
Becky Suss
Jack Shainman Gallery

The term itself is a misnomer. It derives from “Pennsylvania Deutsch,” meaning Pennsylvania German, a description that came to encompass waves of German and Swiss German immigrants who arrived in the region from the 17th to 19th centuries. This culture spans more traditional Amish and Mennonite communities as well as Lutheran and German Reformed congregations. The group is centered in Lancaster County, which became famous for its highly decorated folk art, painted furniture, embroidery samplers, hex signs—geometric and circular folk art painted on barns and buildings—and Fraktur, a kind of illuminated manuscript.

While Pennsylvania Dutch aesthetics have deep historical roots, Buckwalter is among many contemporary women artists finding inspiration in its culture. Becky Suss, Rebecca Morgan, and Sarah McEneaney have all adopted formal qualities and imagery from the region. Meanwhile, rising painter Samantha Joy Groff takes a more direct, even anthropological approach by painting the contemporary women of Pennsylvania Dutch culture in her nocturnal, rural tableaux.

These artists share geographic and cultural ties to the region. They use its visual language to explore domesticity, sexuality, women’s work, and the nuances of cultural pride and shame.

Pennsylvania Dutch interiors

For Buckwalter and Suss, Pennsylvania Dutch aesthetics are intrinsically tied to the home and childhood memory. Both artists paint interior domestic scenes with a flattened, warped perspective. In these spaces, they depict folk objects or family heirlooms that suggest memory, lineage, and loss.

“I pull a lot of things directly from my childhood home,” said Buckwalter, who will open “Heirloom,” a major institutional solo show at the Allentown Art Museum, on November 21st. An in-progress painting features a chair from her childhood home.

Suss, whose solo exhibition “Night House” is on view at Jack Shainman, New York, through October 31st, grew up just north of Philadelphia. She began painting interiors after her paternal grandfather died in 2011. Both grandparents had played a major role in her life, and she felt strange among their furniture after they were gone. Their Long Island ranch house was eventually sold and demolished, and Suss inherited its contents. Her earliest paintings offered remembrances of this space and functioned as “part set painting, like a stage backdrop, and part archive of these items.”

Night House (Kitchen), 2026
Becky Suss
Jack Shainman Gallery

Quilt Study (Lone Star), 2025
Anne Buckwalter
Uffner & Liu

Eventually, Suss began exploring the other side of her family tree. She imagined spaces and objects linked to her mother’s relatives, Irish American on one side and Pennsylvania German on the other. Most of them had died before she was born. “My great-aunt, one of the remaining people in my mother’s family by the time I was alive, had a beautiful chest that was painted. It always seemed like this amazing magical item in her house,” she said. She also recalls childhood visits to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) and the Barnes Foundation with her mother, a docent. She was drawn to the work of self-taught artists including Henri Rousseau, Horace Pippin, and the Pennsylvania Dutch. In one of her paintings currently on view, titled Living Room (2026), three Pennsylvania Dutch plates from the PMA’s collection are displayed over a bookshelf.

McEneaney has lived in Philadelphia since moving there for college in 1973. She paints with a similarly flattened perspective, shaped by Philadelphia museum collections and artists with regional ties. “I feel affinity with vernacular artists like Horace Pippin in terms of subject matter and flatness,” she said.

For Suss, however, painting domestic interiors pushes her beyond memory and into a space of desire and imagination. “There’s the idea of coveting things that I can never afford, which is always an element of my work,” she said. “The Pennsylvania Dutch have always been a part of that. There are things that I always just really, really loved.”

Samantha Joy Groff’s Mennonite influences

Samantha Joy Groff was raised in a Mennonite community in rural Pennsylvania. She paints moody, night-lit scenes of young women in satin negligees who commune with animals in the woods. Her models are often women she knows, and she sometimes depicts them wearing the traditional head coverings common to more conservative Pennsylvania Dutch communities.

Groff, who still lives and teaches in the region, says the culture was embedded in her childhood and her design sense. “I grew up going to quilt circles with my Grams and seeing the ornate textiles made by many women in the community; there is a great reverence for what’s called traditional folk arts like quilting, Fraktur, embroidery, and furniture making,” she said.

She no longer relies on overt references in her paintings, but she sees the culture in her process: “The staging, working with many women with similar upbringings, drawing, making studies, and then finally painting harkens to the hand-stitched 10-foot quilts my family made,” she said.

The patterns, too, carry meaning. “Interlocking circles for weddings, hex signs on barns for luck and prosperity. At first glance, it could be just a design, but like flowers in Victorian paintings, it holds more meaning,” she said. Stars symbolize good luck. Stylized birds, called distelfinks, symbolize happiness. Oaks and acorns bring strength. She’s also a fan of Buckwalter’s work, which makes her feel like she’s “sneaking around my Grams’s house.”

Women’s stories and an overlooked heritage

Buckwalter describes herself as a homebody who’s very sensitive to space. “I take a lot of pride and joy in making a space feel like home, and nesting, and tidying things,” she said. Part of her interest in Pennsylvania Dutch culture is rooted in the idea of elevating the everyday: Women decorated mundane objects, like chairs and pitchers and bread boxes, with such intricate, frilly designs that they became, in Buckwalter’s words “almost holy.” “There’s something worshipful about domestic space that I really love and that I carry through my work.”

Her forthcoming museum show draws directly on that tradition. Working with the museum’s curator, she selected pieces from the Allentown collection, including show towels, embroidered samplers that Pennsylvania Dutch girls, usually 12 or 13 years old, made to prove their readiness for marriage. “It’s basically an embroidered sampler saying, ‘Look, I can sew, I’ll be a good wife,’” she explained.

Suss, meanwhile, sees her relationship to the home as part of a multigenerational tradition of housekeeping. Her 2017 solo show “Homemaker” at Jack Shainman included paintings of inherited needlepoints. “My real legacy is homemaking,” she said. “Yet we have five generations of homemakers, and nobody talks about it.” She hopes her paintings in some way elevate this devalued legacy. “Craft is in most cases devalued in comparison to art, because it has utility, which devalues something,” she said.

Groff, whose family settled in Pennsylvania in 1696, sees women as the keepers of that tradition. “Women are the great artists in the culture, and rather than just making homes, they are in charge of passing down over 200 years of traditional making that makes their craft so recognizable,” she said. Like Suss, she thinks the word “homemaking” undersells it. “I think ‘homemaking’ dampens the importance of the work. Reframing it as tradition, history, and generational knowledge honors the difficulty and hard work that’s embedded in each piece.”

Groff also pushes back on a romantic view of the work. “In our current cultural climate, homemaking is often seen as staying home and making bread as a kind of class fantasy, but in these spaces, my grandma and cousins still have to milk cows on the farm alongside the men,” she said. Like Buckwalter, she sees self-determination at the center of the culture. “I think they are turning ordinary spaces into places of beauty through their individual creative expression.” Groff has carried some of that making into new work, including the garments, from headdresses to props, she created for her show “Huntress.”

Artist Rebecca Morgan, who is best known for hyper-detailed, humorous paintings and ceramics about rural Appalachian life and stereotypes, has also embraced Pennsylvania Dutch aesthetics as an emblem of local pride. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, she often saw hex signs decorating local houses, barns, and sheds. “I always knew them as a ‘Pennsylvania Charm’ to give good luck, or to protect,” she said. “As a child, seeing a hex sign felt specific to my region of Pennsylvania. You didn’t see them in any other scenario other than the Pennsylvania radius, so it was a symbolic emblem of home.” A decade ago, the artist created a series of paintings with the motif. One work, a self-portrait she calls Pennsylvania Princess (year), features the artist wearing a mountain-laurel crown (Pennsylvania’s state flower) and a chest plate featuring a family hex sign that suggests a crest or superhero emblem. “I have always kept this unfinished painting with me because of its sincerity,” she said. A new body of her work is currently on view in “Painting in the Apocalypse” at Asya Geisberg.

Contemporary ambiguity meets Pennsylvania Dutch styles

While the culture of the Pennsylvania Dutch, with its emphasis on family, faith, and homemaking, offers a traditional, even conservative framework for living, contemporary artists are using the style to create more nuanced, ambiguous spaces.

Groff, for her part, says the eroticism in her work runs counter to her upbringing. “When you grow up in a community like this, although known for its warm and friendly people, there is very little emotional excess,” she said. “‘Rural stoicism’ comes into play. But the emotional restraint I felt and continue to feel made everything bubbling inside of me that was messy want to seep out.”

The artist places her figures in remote settings, “away from the metaphorical community spaces where the emotional excess spills out through the figuration—a more psychological space, where danger lurks just outside the picture plane.” Her works have also been heavily influenced by her research into braucherei, a Pennsylvania Dutch religious folk healing practice. “I wanted to make paintings that evoke the divine in a way that may only make sense to a few,” she said. “Even the [Pennsylvania] Dutch tradition of hex signs on barns, which is debated as decorative or symbolic, informs how I make paintings that connect to a religious experience.” The scenes teeter between a kind of ecstatic spirituality and heightened sexuality, where no truth is discernibly clear.

Counter View, 2025
Sarah McEneaney
Taymour Grahne Projects

Still Life with Ankle Cuffs, 2026
Anne Buckwalter
New Discretions

Buckwalter acknowledges that Pennsylvania Dutch culture “very much amplifies heteronormative values” and explains that she was raised in a strict Christian household where there was a “moral panic” over sexuality and the possibility of premarital sex. She describes herself as a bisexual, queer woman who is “happily and intentionally childless.” But she says she maintains “a lot of affection and warmth for my upbringing, even the strict religious parts.” In her paintings, sexuality and kink live comfortably within these idyllic, old-fashioned worlds.

“I think one way that my work functions is as a way of reconciling or marrying these disparate parts of myself, and I’m kind of making the statement that all these things can live together even though they seem like they conflict with each other,” she said.

For Suss, tension and ambiguity function more subtly. The artist leaves figures out of her spaces entirely. The interiors lack any markers of a particular time. Such distortions enhance her storytelling. “I wanted to leave the paintings open to be the backdrop to your life or my life or whoever’s life,” she said. “When you depart from a memory, the departures from truth tell the story.”

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