B. NEW YORK, 1927
Born in 1927 in New York, Sheila Isham pursued a highly original approach to abstract painting that drew on diverse art movements and cultural philosophies such as Russian avant-gardism, the Washington Color School, ancient Chinese calligraphy, Haitian animism, and Hindu and Buddhist tantric practices. This wide range of influences reflects Isham’s journeys around the world with her husband, Heyward Isham—a career Foreign Service officer who later served as Ambassador to Haiti. After studying at the University of Geneva and Bryn Mawr College, Isham became the first American citizen to be accepted to the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, where she trained with Die Brücke artists such as Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Relocating to Moscow in 1955, Isham was exposed to the work of Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, and other Russian avant-garde figures. Returning to the United States in 1957, Isham developed her practice in Washington, D.C. and New York before moving to Hong Kong in 1962 where she studied calligraphy with the master Feng Kanghou. She completed her arc of travels in Paris in the mid-1970s before settling in Sagaponack, New York in 1978.
At her home and studio in the Hamptons, Isham embraced daring techniques to evoke her environs. The artist described her move to the East End as one that pulled her closer to nature: “I liked the feeling of earth and sea and sky. … The way the sky interacts with the earth and how the sea plays a role. It’s always there, that interplay between the three.” Combing her beachy surroundings, Isham would hold seaweed, sponges, and other substances against canvas, using an airbrush to spray acrylic paint around them. This approach resulted in dynamic storms of color across the surface of her light-filled canvases that are highly spiritual and meditative in essence.
Isham has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (1961; 1981); Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo (1974; 1981); The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg (2004); and the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2005). Isham is represented in public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill; Baltimore Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, among others. Her work will be presented in the upcoming solo show Sheila Isham: Women of Jefferson Place (October–December, 2022) at the Cody Gallery, Marymount University, Arlington.
It started with an exhibition catalog from the 1970s—one with eerily contemporary work and the names of two largely overlooked female artists, Eva Hesse and Nina Yankowitz. Both had been rightfully featured in the 1970 Emily Lowe Gallery exhibition in Hempstead, New York, but their work had been victimized by systematic failure. Female artists in the 1970s—especially those finding creative inspiration outside of New York City—rarely found a market foothold and, to Eric Firestone, needed a proper reintroduction for today’s audiences. For Firestone, the catalog was a catalyst and a moral obligation to reignite dialogue around Yankowitz and Hesse, and present them amongst their peers in the gallery's current show, "Hanging/Leaning: Women Artists on Long Island, the 1960s-80s." Firestone was sold when Yankowitz pulled out Sagging Spiro (1969) from her "Draped Painting" series of linen panels. “They feel so relevant and fresh and in dialogue with multiple artists,” says Firestone. “Once people know about this work. I think it's going to be a revelation.” The mixed media piece, which hangs front and center of Firestone’s Newton Lane outpost in East Hampton, sings with the same harmony as Sam Gilliam and Katherine Grosse, though Sagging Spiro predated the artists by three and 30 odd years, respectively. The work is a perfect introduction for the mixed-media exhibition, which plays with Long Island’s geographic surroundings, the beat-poet vibe of the '60s- and '70s-era Hamptons and general energetic joy in the unsung.
