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It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of artist Sheila Isham on April 9, 2024 at age 96.
Throughout a dedicated career spanning over five decades, Isham used painting, lithography, book arts, and collage to explore her enduring interest in philosophy, spirituality, and nature. The diplomatic career of her husband Heyward Isham led her to live and work in various places, including Berlin, Moscow, Hong Kong, Haiti, and Washington, D.C. As Edward Solanski, a critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, once astutely noted, “Isham’s work is ultimately not about describing or symbolizing but about generating life force.”
It was in the mid-1960s in Washington, D.C. that Isham took up using light-boxes and the airbrush to create atmospheric color abstractions with impressionistic light effects, for which she is best known. The technique of the airbrush, along with her ethereal palette, allowed her to create cloud-like, sublime forms that capture the sensation of the numinous. Reviewing her 1967 exhibition at the Jefferson Place Gallery in The Washington Post, Paul Richard wrote, “The viewer feels he’s surrounded by swirling and transparent light-soaked clouds.”
Unlike many Washington Color School painters who were concerned first and foremost with the expression of color as material, Isham’s works were decidedly more metaphysical, “material expressions of ecstatic visions, avatars of what she considered a divine singularity. . . Bursts of color, yes, but more: floating clusters of energies that suggest vibrations on a higher spiritual plane,” as noted by art historian Patricia Lewy.
Hollis Taggart began representing Isham in 2022, who had her first solo exhibition with Hollis Taggart in February 2023. The show focused on her paintings from 1969 to 1978, and was accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue. Isham’s work is held in many important collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D. C.; Baltimore Museum of Art; Library of Congress; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Yale University Art Gallery; Princeton University Art Museum; Philadelphia Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum of Art; New York Public Library; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; among others.
Read more in The Washington Post and The East Hampton Star.
Sheila Eaton Isham (1927-2024). Photograph by Martin Brett Axon of the artist in her studio in Southampton in 1986.
Sheila Eaton Isham (b. 1927, New York City) is an American artist whose color abstractions draw on a wide range of cultural formations—from twentieth-century European avant-garde approaches to Washington Color School techniques; from ancient Chinese calligraphy, philosophy, and poetry, to Haitian animism and modes of Hindu and Buddhist tantric practices. While seemingly random, this arc of influences follows the trajectory of Isham’s journeys abroad accompanying her husband, Heyward Isham, a career Foreign Service officer (later Ambassador to Haiti), first to Berlin, then to Moscow, followed by Washington, D.C., Hong Kong, Paris, and Haiti, finally settling in Sagaponack, New York. In India and then in New York, Isham sought out the spiritual practices of Siddha Yoga with gurus Swami Muktananda and Gurumayi Chidvilasandanda, whose teachings further informed her aesthetic vision.
Early instruction began at the University of Geneva (1948–1949) and continued at Bryn Mawr College from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1950. Moving to Berlin with her husband who had been appointed to the American Mission there, she became the first American citizen to be accepted at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, where for the next four years (1950–1954) she received instruction from several artists of the Die Brücke group, among them Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. When her husband was assigned to the United States Embassy in Moscow in 1955, she moved with him, gaining exposure to the characteristic urban landscape over the next two years. She was able to obtain rare access to the diplomat George Costakis’s collection of Russian avant-garde artists, including works by Kasimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, and Marc Chagall. Returning to the United States in 1957 when her husband was brought back to the State Department, Isham spent the next five years creating artwork in Washington, D.C. and at the Pratt Graphic Center in New York. It was during this period that Isham turned to contemporary trends in American art, which catalyzed for her new techniques and procedures. In 1962, Heyward Isham was assigned to the U. S. Consulate General in Hong Kong. There Isham studied calligraphy with the master Feng Kanghou, a hugely influential source that she would mine for her evolving visual vocabulary. In Washington, D.C. from 1965 to 1971, Isham’s paintings and works on paper received several one-person galley exhibitions and were acquired by major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (formerly, the National Museum of American Art). Moving to Paris in 1971 when Heyward Isham was appointed deputy chief of the American Delegation to the Paris peace talks, and ultimately, Chief of Delegation, Isham continued her art practice, exhibiting at the Galerie Darthea Speyer. When in 1974, her husband was made ambassador to Haiti, Isham’s light-filled abstractions would take a turn toward representation under the influence of Haitian animistic and spirit forms. Returning once again to Washington, D.C. in 1977, at the time her husband was designated by the Secretary of State as Director of the Office for Combatting Terrorism (with the rank equivalent to an Assistant Secretary of State), by 1978, the family had settled in Sagaponack, New York. Several years later, in 1982, Isham’s own spiritual proclivities were given further focus through a six-week course of study in Siddha Yoga in India, the iconography of which interpenetrated her artistic practice. Isham’s paintings, lithographs, etchings, and collages conflate an extraordinary repertoire of images and ideas built around her global sojourns, which she has worked out in series after series of expressive, chromatic-filled canvases that to this day link elements across time and cultures in revelatory works of light and surface activation.
The artist in her Sagaponack studio, c. 1979
Isham has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (formerly the National Museum of American Art), Washington, D.C. (1961); the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1974); the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Gallery), Buffalo, New York (1974; 1981); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Miami, Florida (1977); the Museum of Modern Art, New Orleans, Louisiana (1997); Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (1981); the Georgia Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia (1993); the Russian Museum, Marble Palace, St. Petersburg, Russia (1998); Russian State Museum, St. Michaels Palace, St. Petersburg, Russia (2004); and the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2005).
Her work is held in major public and private collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Georgia Museum of Art; the High Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum for Women in the Arts; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Art; Walker Art Center; and the Yale University Art Gallery.
– Patricia L Lewy, Director of the Sheila Isham Archives