Naudline Pierre: May the Light Reach You
Category: Event Calendar
Date and Time
- Wed, Sep 23, 2026 - Sun, Apr 18, 2027
Location
Akron Art Museum
1 S High St
Details
Naudline Pierre conjures fantastical worlds full of movement, transformation, emotion, and beauty. Her artwork features mysterious, celestial figures among delicate, jewel-toned washes of color, swirling lines, and skillful applications of paint or ink, as well as adventurous experimentation with metal. The content of Pierre’s work is deeply intimate, with a pantheon of transcendent feminine beings conveying a broad range of expression—from anger to resilience, tenderness, and more. She calls on viewers to imagine their way into her unfamiliar realities, and thereby to see how their own reality might also change and grow.
In creating her work, Pierre mines classical European art for its conventions and compositions. Starting from some of history’s most famous artworks, she taps into the longstanding foundations that make images compelling and culturally resonant, while turning those themes and structures toward her own invented and continuously unfolding mythology. In this way, her creations may draw on and directly resemble the form and forcefulness of Renaissance frescoes or Baroque altarpieces, but in support of entirely new subjects and narratives. These connections add strength to Pierre’s work, yet her new worlds remain entirely her own. They are places where, she says, “I hold the power and get to do whatever I want.”
This exhibition of Pierre’s paintings, sculptures, and works on paper includes artwork from as early as 2019, not long after the artist first developed her signature style and themes. The galleries also feature a significant number of new works created this year, specifically to be shown here in Akron. Following previous presentations at the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas and The Drawing Center in New York City, this is Pierre’s largest and most ambitious exhibition to date.
Learn more about Naudline Pierre and her practice in Art21’s “Naudline Pierre: A Place Other Than Here,” as part of their digital series New York Close Up.
