On View

Exhibitions

Nancy Azara + Darla Bjork | Sharing Legacy

30 July–20 September 2026
Castello 925, Fondamenta San Giuseppe 925

Gabriella Kirby | Future Light

Featuring sculptures, paintings, prints, and drawings by the late feminist artist Nancy Azara alongside encaustic paintings and drawings by Darla Bjork, Sharing Legacy brings together two distinct practices shaped by a shared life and a commitment to expressive, gesture-driven art. Azara explored matriarchal archetypes, goddess imagery, ancient symbols, and the metaphor of the tree as a representation of personhood, while Bjork’s work draws on the psychological depths of human experience, reflecting her parallel career as a psychiatrist.

Azara and Bjork were partners for more than forty years and were both connected to the New York Feminist Art Institute, which emerged from the feminist movement of the 1970s. Their works developed from different sources, yet both artists share a neo-expressionist language and an interest in layering, materiality, and what lies beneath the surface. Curated by Jen Dragon and Fanny Perez, the exhibition creates a dialogue between personal history, feminist legacy, identity, and the inner life.

Future Light presents mixed-media works on canvas, paper, and plaster exploring vulnerability, memory, generational trauma, and the ways living forms adapt to the world around them. Moving across plant, animal, and human experience, Gabriella Kirby focuses on protective, communicative, and life-giving structures while remaining attentive to fragility and the possibility of future threats. Her natural forms, trembling edges, and gestural surfaces create works that hover between familiarity and memory, darkness and transformation.

The exhibition also marks a return to Kirby’s ancestral roots in the Veneto region. Her grandparents left their Italian mountain village in the aftermath of World War II and later emigrated to the United States; two generations and seventy-five years later, Kirby returns to the region with her own family during the 61st Venice Biennale. This personal history gives the exhibition another layer, connecting inherited trauma with questions of belonging, resilience, and the possibility of renewal.