Jun 1, 2023, 6 PM – 8 PM

Opening Reception:

A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran and Naudline Pierre: This Is Not All There Is

Join us to celebrate the exhibitions A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran and Naudline Pierre: This Is Not All There Is.

Registration not needed for entry.

A Greater Beauty: The Drawings of Kahlil Gibran will feature over one hundred drawings by the proliﬁc Lebanese-American artist, poet and essayist, and coincides with the 100th anniversary of Gibran’s world-renowned publication The Prophet. Though best known for his poetry and prose, Gibran viewed himself equally as a visual artist, producing paintings, watercolors, sketches, illustrations, book covers, and other material as a complement to his written work. A Greater Beauty will present an overview of Gibran’s drawings and sketches alongside manuscript pages, notebooks, correspondence, magazine illustrations and essays, and ﬁrst editions, providing a glimpse into the artist’s production in the context of his work as a whole.

Naudline Pierre harnesses the power of spiritual iconography and transcendental motifs in her layered wash drawings and richly-hued paintings to create ﬁctional worlds rooted in a mythology of her own making. In her exhibition This Is Not All There Is, Pierre will continue her exploration of imagined worlds, incorporating drawings large and small alongside and within sculptural elements to create an immersive environment. Organized by Chief Curator Claire Gilman, This is Not All There Is is the artist's ﬁrst exhibition to exclusively focus on her works on paper.

Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran was born Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān in Ottoman-ruled Bsharri in 1883 to a Maronite Christian family. In 1895, Gibran’s mother moved him, his half-brother, and two younger sisters to Boston, where she worked as a pack peddler, leaving Gibran’s father in Lebanon. Displaying an aptitude for the arts at an early age, Kahlil Gibran was supported in his endeavors by key mentors throughout his life. As a teenager, Gibran met photographer, publisher, and philanthropist Fred Holland Day and poet Josephine Preston Peabody, both of whom provided Gibran with his entrance into Boston’s creative community. Day hosted the first solo exhibition of Gibran’s drawings in 1904 in his Boston photo studio shortly after Gibran returned from Beirut, where he attended college. At that event, Gibran met Mary Haskell, who would become a lifelong friend (there is speculation that the two were also romantically involved) and benefactor to Gibran, paying for him to attend the Academie Julian art school in Paris from 1908 to 1910. While in Paris, Gibran became involved with Syrian political dissidents, whose activities he continued to support upon his return to the United States. Gibran’s artwork was shown in 1914 at Montross Gallery and in 1917 at the galleries of M. Knoedler & Co, both in New York. In 1923, Gibran published his best-known written work The Prophet, an anthology of poems that captured the attention of the world and eventually made Gibran the best-selling American poet of the twentieth century. On April 10, 1931, at the age of forty-eight, Gibran died of liver disease in his home on West 10th Street in New York City. He was buried in Bsharri on the grounds of what is now the Gibran Museum.
Claire Gilman
Naudline Pierre

Naudline Pierre (b. 1989, Leominster, MA) received an MFA from New York Academy of Art, NY, and a BFA from Andrews University, MI. In 2021, her work was featured in Prospect.5 New Orleans and was the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art. Pierre participated in the 2019–2020 Artist Residency program at the Studio Museum in New York and her work was exhibited in a three-person exhibition at MoMA PS1 as a culmination of the program. Pierre has participated in numerous group exhibitions, most recently at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; the Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; and the Museum of Contemporary Art,Chicago, IL. Her work belongs to the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; The Dean Collection, Macedon, NY; ICA Miami, Miami, FL; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; and the CC Foundation, Shanghai, China.