Sheila Isham: Between Worlds

Sheila Isham: Between Worlds is a focused presentation of the artist’s work, organized through key chapters that trace the unfolding of her life and career. Across more than six decades, Isham created a body of painting that reflects a deeply personal journey through abstraction.

Influenced in part by the Washington Color School, particularly the innovations of Sam Gilliam and Kenneth Noland, Isham treated color and material as immersive, intuitive forces. Yet her practice was equally shaped by the cultural and philosophical influences she encountered during formative years living and working in Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Hong Kong, Washington, D.C., and New Delhi.

Through her marriage to Heyward Isham, who served with the U.S. Embassy and whose family maintained longstanding ties to Newport, Isham spent summers in Rhode Island, adding another geographic thread to a life defined by movement between cultures. This exhibition marks a meaningful rediscovery of Isham‘s work within a community connected to her personal history.

A voracious reader and lifelong learner, Isham drew deeply from Taoist philosophy and Jungian psychology, shaping her belief in painting as a spiritual discipline capable of giving form to the unseen.

Bringing together over 30 paintings and works on paper from 1968 to 2004, Sheila Isham: Between Worlds traces the evolution of an artist who continually expanded the possibilities of abstraction. Long admired by peers and critics alike, Isham’s work is held in major museum 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 and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.