Image: Newport Art Museum
The Newport Art Museum is presenting ‘Sheila Isham: Between Worlds’, a focused survey of the American artist’s deeply personal approach to abstraction. On view from July 11, 2026, through February 28, 2027, in the museum’s Griswold House in Newport, Rhode Island, the exhibition brings together more than 30 paintings and works on paper dating from 1968 to 2004.
Organized through key chapters in Isham’s life and career, the exhibition follows her evolving use of color and material. The presentation places her work in relation to the Washington Color School, including the innovations of Sam Gilliam and Kenneth Noland, while also emphasizing the influence of Taoist philosophy and Jungian psychology on her understanding of painting as a spiritual discipline capable of giving form to the unseen.
Isham’s practice developed alongside an unusually mobile life. Her formative years included periods in Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Hong Kong, Washington, D.C., and New Delhi, where she encountered different cultural and intellectual environments. Her connection to Newport was longstanding: through her marriage to Heyward Isham, whose family maintained ties to the city, she spent summers in Rhode Island. The museum describes the exhibition as a rediscovery of her work within a community connected to her personal history.
The works on view include ‘Sun – Penetrating Wind’ (1968), ‘Energy Fields Series, Lü - Fire with Mountain’ (1971), ‘Phoenix Rising’ (1972), and paintings from her ‘Cosmic Myth Series’, including ‘March Across the Desert, Moses and the Burning Bush’ (1980) and ‘Cosmic Myth Series #213’ (1980–81). The selected works demonstrate Isham’s sustained engagement with expansive fields of color, layered surfaces and symbolic references while tracing changes across the period represented.
Isham’s work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art and the Baltimore Museum of Art. It has also been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. A 71-page catalogue authored by Patricia L. Lewy, director of the Sheila Isham Estate Collection and Archives, accompanies the exhibition and includes discussion of the artist’s practice, career and the works presented.
Founded in 1912, the Newport Art Museum describes itself as one of the oldest continuously operating art museums and schools of its kind in the United States. Its collection comprises approximately 3,000 works across painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, decorative arts, installation, textiles and newer media, with a concentration on American and contemporary art. ‘Sheila Isham: Between Worlds’ remains on view at the Griswold House through February 28, 2027.
