Image: Naudline Pierre. Teach Me How, 2023. Oil and oil stick on linen. Photo by Dan Bradica, courtesy of James Cohan Gallery © Naudline Pierre
The Akron Art Museum will present ‘Naudline Pierre: May the Light Reach You’ in its Karl and Bertl Arnstein Galleries from September 23, 2026, through April 18, 2027. The exhibition will bring together paintings, sculptures and works on paper by Naudline Pierre, including works dating from 2019 and a significant number of new pieces created specifically for the presentation.
Pierre’s work constructs fantastical worlds populated by airy figures and female spirits. Across delicate, jewel-toned washes of colour, swirling lines and carefully worked applications of paint or ink, her figures convey a broad range of emotions, including anger, resilience and tenderness. The artist also experiments with metal in her sculptural work.
The Akron Art Museum describes Pierre’s imagery as a means of inviting viewers to imagine themselves within unfamiliar realities and to consider how their own realities might change and grow. The exhibition’s title and presentation will centre this imaginative quality, while bringing together works that explore movement, transformation and emotion.
Pierre draws on the conventions and compositions of classical European art, including the visual structures associated with Renaissance frescoes and Baroque altarpieces. According to the museum, she begins with some of art history’s most recognisable works and redirects their established forms and cultural resonance toward an invented mythology, producing new subjects and narratives. The resulting worlds remain her own; Pierre has said, “I hold the power and get to do whatever I want.”
The exhibition follows earlier presentations at The Drawing Center in New York City and the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas. With its combination of earlier works and new commissions or works made specifically for the Akron presentation, the museum calls it Pierre’s largest and most ambitious showing to date.
‘Naudline Pierre: May the Light Reach You’ will be on view in the Karl and Bertl Arnstein Galleries at the Akron Art Museum in Akron, United States, from September 23, 2026, to April 18, 2027. The exhibition is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Mary and Dr. George L. Demetros Charitable Trust, Kenneth L. Calhoun Charitable Trust and Ohio Arts Council.
