Summer Art Party 2026

On Friday, July 10th, we are delighted to invite you to join us in celebrating and supporting the Museum at this year’s signature event.

Inspired by the visionary artist Sheila Isham, the evening will coincide with the opening of Sheila Isham: Between Worlds, a major exhibition honoring her extraordinary artistic achievements and the global reach of her work. In addition, we are thrilled to unveil another exciting new exhibition featuring Angel Otero: The Ocean Forgot Your Garden.

Summer Art Party Committee
Co-Chairs: Ellen Bowman • Chas A. Miller III • Marie Samuels
Members: Sandra Craig • Sherry Fardie • Sue Metzger • Rebecca Rex

VIP Table Sponsors as of 4/10/26

If you can’t join us but would like to support the Museum and our Mission to serve the community through innovative, thought-provoking exhibitions and the presentation of our permanent collection throughout our galleries, please donate. 

Attire for the evening breathes Ethereal Elegance. Inspired by Sheila Isham and Angel Otero, guests are encouraged to wear nature-inspired tones. Think luminous color, flowing silhouettes, and layered textures with a dreamlike quality.

Sheila Isham: Between Worlds

Opening July 10, 2026 during the Newport Art Museum’s prestigious Summer Art Party.

On Friday, July 10, 2026, the Newport Art Museum is honored to present Sheila Isham: Between Worlds, a major exhibition celebrating one of the most singular voices in postwar American abstraction.

Spanning more than six decades, Isham’s work traces a deeply personal and philosophical journey through abstraction. Transforming color, gesture, and material into sites of meditation and discovery, she approached painting as a spiritual discipline — a means of giving form to the unseen. Her practice was profoundly shaped by formative years in Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Hong Kong, Washington, D.C., and New Delhi, drawing on influences ranging from Taoist philosophy to Jungian psychology.

Sheila Isham, Sun – Penetrating Wind, 1968. Acrylic on canvas, 89 3/4 x 113 in.

This exhibition brings together rare and, in some cases, never-before-exhibited works from 1968 to 2004, illuminating the evolution of an artist who continually expanded the language of abstraction. Long admired by peers and critics alike, Isham’s work is represented in major collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art, and has been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Presenting Sheila Isham: Between Worlds reflects the Newport Art Museum’s commitment to placing historic and contemporary art in meaningful dialogue, elevating artists whose contributions merit renewed and well-deserved attention. We invite you to join us in supporting this landmark exhibition and celebrating Sheila Isham’s enduring legacy.

Angel Otero: The Ocean Forgot Your Garden

Opening July 10, 2026 during the Newport Art Museum’s prestigious Summer Art Party.

Angel Otero, The Sea, 2023, Oil paint and fabric collaged on canvas. Photo by Stefan Altenburger; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery.

The Exhibition takes its title from a recent work by Angel Otero and serves as a conceptual anchor for the exhibition. Born in Puerto Rico and splitting his time between Puerto Rico and New York, Otero maintains a deep connection to the island, where the sea is a constant physical, cultural, and historical presence.

Stretching between Puerto Rico and Newport, the Atlantic has long shaped patterns of movement, labor, and exchange. Both places are defined by cycles of departure and return, where maritime life informs daily rhythms and collective identity. Here, the ocean is not simply a passage, but a living presence, carrying histories, erasures, and the quiet accumulation of memory over time.

Across Otero’s recent body of work, water emerges as a site of memory and transformation. The sea appears as a recurring force, dynamic and generative, registered through layered surfaces and imagery that feels fluid rather than fixed. Waves, tides, and currents are embedded through material density and compositional rhythm rather than direct depiction.

Otero’s process plays a central role in this sensibility. His additive method involves layering oil paint that is pressed and transferred as ‘skins’ and reassembled onto canvas, allowing earlier gestures to remain visible. Memory is carried forward materially, producing surfaces that feel built through time. 

Within these environments, Otero often places domestic objects, furniture, instruments, and fragments of interior life within oceanic settings. These familiar forms introduce intimacy, suggesting how personal histories move between interior and exterior spaces, between stability and change. Drawing on works in which water is both a visual and conceptual presence, the exhibition considers the sea as a metaphor for connection, passage, and the movement of memory across geographies, histories, and lived experience.

About the Artist: Angel Otero (b. 1981, Santurce, Puerto Rico) lives and works between Puerto Rico and New York. Working across painting and sculpture, he has developed a distinctive process in which layers of oil paint are built, transferred, and reassembled, often incorporating fabric and other materials. In 2010, he was awarded the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Visual Arts, an early marker of the critical recognition his practice has since received. Otero’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, including presentations at the Bronx Museum of Arts, New York, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, among others Recent exhibitions include The Ocean in My Room at Vito Schnabel Gallery, St. Moritz, in 2023. He is currently the artist-in-residence at Hauser & Wirth Somerset ahead of his UK debut exhibition opening in May.