Buffalo, NY – Today the Albright-Knox announced that it has received a $300,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to support the upcoming traveling exhibition that will celebrate the life and work of Marisol (Venezuelan and American, born France, 1930–2016). 

“We are deeply grateful for the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation,” said Dr. Cathleen Chaffee, Chief Curator of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and curator of the exhibition. “Marisol’s bequest of her estate to the Albright-Knox in 2016 was one of the most significant events in the history of the museum. The generosity of the Henry Luce Foundation will empower us to share the fullest possible portrait of this extraordinary artist and her work with a wide range of new audiences. We are thrilled that the Foundation’s support will also help enable our work to create the most comprehensive publication ever written on Marisol.” 

The Albright-Knox was the first museum to formally acquire Marisol’s work, having purchased the sculptures The Generals, 1961–62, from her solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in 1962, and Baby Girl, 1963, in 1964. Marisol developed an enduring respect for the Albright-Knox and the people associated with it, including the museum’s important patron Seymour H. Knox, Jr., and Buffalo native Sidney Janis, her longtime friend and her dealer from 1966 until his death in 1989.

These relationships may have inspired her historic collection bequest to the Albright-Knox on her death in 2016. Spanning the entirety of her sixty-year career—from her watershed Pop sculptures of the 1960s to her very last drawings—the bequest includes more than 100 sculptures and three-dimensional studies, hundreds of works on paper, thousands of photographs and slides, and the artist’s archive and library. With this bequest, the Albright-Knox now holds the world’s most significant collection of Marisol’s work and is able to present a rich perspective on this pioneering yet under-researched artist. 

“Marisol’s bequest came fifty-two years after Clyfford Still’s important gift of thirty-one paintings to the museum,” recalled Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director. “We are honored that two extraordinarily innovative artists whose creative practices changed the trajectory of art in the twentieth century put so much faith in the Albright-Knox. This major exhibition of Marisol’s lifework is a significant milestone in our endeavor to celebrate and foster the appreciation of the artist’s legacy.”

Since learning of the bequest in 2016, the Albright-Knox has researched and taken inventory of Marisol’s estate. The museum’s curators and registrars spent weeks inside Marisol’s home and studio, documenting its contents in situ. The team then assessed which objects constituted completed artworks and which were studies or experiments, a project that continues to this day. Many of Marisol’s personal collections—including dresses designed for her by Halston and jewelry of her own design—form part of the artist’s archive at the museum.

Recently, the work of cataloguing, photographing, and safely housing the bequest was greatly assisted by a CARES Act grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In October 2020, Curatorial Research Fellow Dr. Julia Vázquez joined the Albright-Knox staff to assist in research on the collection and its preparation for exhibition.

Marisol’s bequest coincided with the museum’s planning for its first major campus expansion since 1962. After the grand opening of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in 2022, the museum will launch the traveling retrospective survey of Marisol’s work, organized by Chief Curator Dr. Cathleen Chaffee, which is generously supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. 

The exhibition will occupy roughly 9,000 square feet with art and supporting materials grouped into approximately six sections tracing Marisol’s career as it unfolded from the 1950s to the early twenty-first century. In addition to a chronological and thematic survey of Marisol’s sculptures and works on paper, the exhibition foregrounds other aspects of her work such as her public art projects and the costumes and stage sets she designed for choreographers. It also addresses her relationship with feminism, politics, and the art of her time. Photographs of Marisol with her works help illustrate the extent to which her persona—which she curated for the cameras of Andy Warhol, Hans Namuth, and Robert Mapplethorpe, among many others—was connected with her life-long practice of sculptural self-portraiture. While she was Venezuelan, Marisol was also indisputably American, and much of her art critically examined the experience of transnationalism while tackling topics such as racial and economic exclusion and women’s roles in society. This exhibition, its accompanying publication, and its online components will present a richly textured view of this complex and highly influential Latin American artist. 

About Marisol

One of the most prominent artists of her generation, whose innovative work helped define the 1960s, Marisol (Venezuelan and American, 1930–2016) was born María Sol Escobar in Paris to a Venezuelan family. The family moved back to Venezuela around 1935, and Marisol spent her early years traveling between New York and Caracas. She drew continually from a very young age and adopted the name Marisol—which alludes to the Spanish words for “sea” and “sun”—in her early teens. She would use Marisol as her professional name for the rest of her life. In 1946, her family moved to Los Angeles, where she studied art at the Otis Art Institute and with Howard Warshaw at the Jepson Art Institute. She then briefly attended the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before moving around 1950 to New York, where she took classes at the Art Students League (between 1951 and 1963); studied with Hans Hofmann (at his studios in New York and also in Provincetown, Massachusetts, between 1952 and 1955); and attended the New School for Social Research (in 1952) and the Brooklyn Museum Art School (between 1955 and 1957). 

Like many of the artists who emerged in the early 1950s, Marisol was at first strongly influenced by the prevailing school of Abstract Expressionist painting. She came to know many of the figures associated with this group and was friends with artists such as Willem de Kooning. After seeing pre-Columbian art in Mexico while visiting her father and in a New York gallery show in the early 1950s, Marisol began making sculpture in 1954. At first she worked on a relatively small scale in terra-cotta and in wood, and used the lost-wax method of casting in bronze. Within a few years, however, she began focusing on life-size, totemic figures. These mixed-media assemblages combined wood with painting and found objects in a style that was sometimes quizzical or satirical but always highly accessible. When the Pop art movement emerged, Marisol’s works were often associated with it, although her sculptures were also distinct from the observations on mass media and mass culture put forward by friends and peers such as Andy Warhol. 

Marisol’s work quickly drew the attention of the legendary art dealer Leo Castelli, who in 1957 included her in a show along with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and gave her a solo exhibition at his gallery. Wider public acclaim came in 1962, following her first solo exhibition at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery. The Albright-Knox Art Gallery was the first museum to formally acquire a sculpture of Marisol’s with a purchase from that show, and LIFE magazine featured her in its “Red-Hot Hundred” list. Images of Marisol and her work, reproduced in LIFE and elsewhere in the popular press, extended her reputation far beyond the art world. Her 1964 exhibition at the Stable Gallery received up to two thousand visitors a day, and her first solo show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1966 was even more popular. During the exhibition’s run, there was a regular queue of people waiting to see the remarkable life-size figures, many of which addressed the role of women in society.

Marisol became widely known not only for her powerful work but also for mingling in much-publicized creative social circles, including with associates of Warhol’s Factory. Warhol called her “the first girl artist with glamour” and cast her in two of his best-known 1964 films: Kiss and The 13 Most Beautiful Women. In 1968, Marisol represented Venezuela at the Venice Biennale and was one of only four women among the 149 artists selected for that year’s Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany. 

Although she would withdraw from the New York art scene for long periods, Marisol continued her work in sculpture while also exploring other mediums, such as drawing, printmaking, and photography, often taking on commissions. In 1963, LIFE commissioned a sculptural portrait of actor John Wayne that was reproduced from all angles within the pages of the magazine, and her works were featured on the cover of Time magazine on six occasions. In the early 1970s, the artist’s travels and underwater photography inspired her to make a series of carved and cast sculptures of fish. At the same time, she also embarked on a series of expressive, large-scale drawings whose bright colors belie their often-violent subject matter. She designed sets and costumes for dance companies such as those of Louis Falco, Martha Graham, and Elisa Monte, and she would eventually create public monuments to historical figures around the world.

In the late 1970s Marisol focused on portrait sculpture, creating homages to Graham, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O’Keeffe, and de Kooning, among many others, and this body of work was celebrated in the 1981 exhibition Artists and Artistes by Marisol at the Sidney Janis Gallery. The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, also focused on this aspect of her practice in 1991’s Magical Mixtures: Marisol Portrait Sculpture. 

In the 1980s Marisol made a number of works that address poverty and social injustice, and in the 1990s she embarked on a series of portrait sculptures of famous Native Americans, the focus of a 1995 Marlborough Gallery exhibition.

A major retrospective exhibition organized in 2014 by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Marisol: Sculptures and Works on Paper, subsequently traveled to El Museo del Barrio in New York, stimulating fresh critical interest in her immense and varied achievement. 

Works by Marisol are included in the collections of many major museums, including those of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; the Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.  

About the Henry Luce Foundation

A leader in art funding since 1982, the Luce Foundation's American Art Program supports innovative museum projects nationwide that advance the role of visual arts of the United States in an open and equitable society, and the potential of museums to serve as forums for art-centered conversations that celebrate creativity, explore difference, and seek common ground. The Foundation aims to empower museums and arts organizations to reconsider accepted histories, foreground the voices and experiences of underrepresented artists and cultures, and welcome diverse collaborators and communities into dialogue.

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