Bodies & Souls: Robert and Frances Coulborn Kohler Collection
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).
