Bodies & Souls: Robert and Frances Coulborn Kohler Collection
03/14/2026
06/07/2026
About the Exhibition
Charles Knox Smith Hall
"Representation is a crucial location of struggle for any exploited and oppressed people asserting subjectivity and decolonization of the mind." — bell hooks
Bodies and Souls traces the imaginative and ethical force of representational art while celebrating the growth of Woodmere’s collection through the generous underwriting of Robert and Frances Coulborn Kohler. Woodmere’s continuing partnership with the Kohlers is grounded in a commitment to Philadelphia’s artists and to works in which visibility and self-definition are actively claimed.
Focusing on late twentieth and early twenty-first century paintings, drawings, and sculpture by artists including Barbara Bullock, Roland Ayers, Marta Sanchez, Sidney Goodman, Andrew Turner, Henry Bermudez, Ashley Flynn, Anne Minich, Twins Seven Seven, and many others, the exhibition reveals how representational figurative practices insist on presence. These artists depict bodies as relational, vulnerable, and resilient, attending to gender, sexuality, interiority, and urban life, while countering erasure and exclusion with strong visual narratives. Bodies and Souls presents representation as a liberatory strategy—one that enables artists to see and be seen on their own terms, documenting embodied experience while imagining more just and humane ways of being in the world.
Bodies and Souls is presented concurrently with an exhibition of the same title featuring the Kohlers' personal collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (https://www.pafa.org/museum/exhibitions/bodies-souls-kohler-collection).
Opening Reception
Location: Charles Knox Smith Hall, 9201 Germantown Avenue
Saturday, March 14, 2026 | 2 PM - 4 PM
Please join us for the Opening Reception for Bodies and Souls. Admission is FREE and open to the public.
Bodies and Souls Gallery Talk
Location: Charles Knox Smith Hall, 9201 Germantown Avenue
Saturday, March 14 | 1 pm
With Robert Cozzolino, independent curator, art historian, and critic
FREE
Join guest curator, Robert Cozzolino for a behind-the-scenes tour of Bodies and Souls: Robert and Frances Coulborn Kohler Collection. Learn about the themes and artists that inspired the Kohlers to collect late twentieth and early twenty-first century paintings, drawings, and sculpture by Philadelphia artists.
Robert Cozzolino is based in Minneapolis. He curates collaboratively, in partnership with artists, colleagues, and broad communities.
Artists' Talk: Henry Bermudez and Judith Schaechter
Location: Charles Knox Smith Hall, 9201 Germantown Avenue
Moderated by guest curator, Robert Cozzolino
Saturday, April 18 | 2 pm
$10 (FREE Woodmere Members)
Join Henry Bermudez and Judith Schaechter for an artists’ talk moderated by curator Robert Cozzolino. These two powerful voices in contemporary art will explore how personal history, emotion, and cultural memory shape their work. They will discuss their artistic practices, influences, and consider the ways their art speaks to the present moment.
Henry Bermudez is a Venezuela-born artist who came to Philadelphia in 2003 seeking political asylum. His art exudes beauty and the energy of life through vibrant colors, patterns and dazzling textures that convey the sensuousness of the plants and foliage of the tropical rainforests of Latin America and his love and reverence for its cultures and mythological deities. (Bermudez became a US citizen in 2013.)
Judith Schaechter is a stained glass artist whose work weaves together psychological narratives, personal experiences, and bold subject matter, creating pieces that are both visually striking and emotionally resonant. She creates images of unique beauty that convey, as she states, "people transcending their own pain."
