A groundbreaking exhibition at MacDowell's Manhattan gallery space is introducing the public to the revolutionary "Burntworks" of sculptor Luise Kaish for the first time. The show, titled "Luise Kaish: Fire on the Mountain," reveals how a moment of creative frustration at the MacDowell artist colony in New Hampshire led to an entirely new artistic technique that would define the later years of Kaish's six-decade career.
The pivotal moment occurred during the summer of 1976 when Luise and her husband Morton Kaish, both accomplished artists, were residents at MacDowell. According to their daughter Melissa Kaish, the couple frequently traveled together for residencies throughout their 65-year marriage, visiting Italy when Luise won the Prix de Rome in sculpture, Dartmouth for joint residencies, and Alaska for artistic inspiration. During their MacDowell stay, Luise became frustrated with her canvas experiments and threw scraps into her studio's fireplace.
Morton Kaish witnessed what happened next and later recalled the transformative moment: "As the canvas burns and curls, she sees rich black and brown tones that are created by the fire. They're bold, they're subtle, and she knows they could never be made or matched by paint or pigment. She snatches it all out of the fire, dragging the burning strips onto the stone floor, and begins to recompose, to layer, to cut, and to arrange." This spontaneous act in MacDowell's Cheney studio launched Kaish's exploration of what she called "Burntworks" – collages created from scorched canvas.
Up until that point, Kaish was primarily known as a pioneering sculptor of monumental bronze figures. However, the Burntworks would become her signature medium for the next decade, with more than 15 major pieces created using this fire-based technique. Susan Fisher, curator and director of the Kaish Family Art Project, describes it as "this radical moment for her, where she is kind of destroying something to create it." The project stewards the legacies of both Luise, who died in 2013 at age 87, and Morton, who passed away just last week at 98.
The Burntworks allowed Kaish to treat canvas like sculpture, building up subtle but tactile layers with varying degrees of char, resembling used coffee filters in texture. The artworks she created at MacDowell and continued after returning to New York City are compelling in their contradictions – raw and spare in some areas, aggressively singed in others, precisely glued but with intentional asymmetries and fraying edges throughout. Fisher notes these works must be experienced up close to fully appreciate their complexity.
Kaish's early monochromatic Burntworks possess what Fisher describes as "poetic austerity," demonstrating how much the artist could express with just fabric and fire. Later works incorporated paint and natural materials like tree bark, but the original pieces maintain their stark power. The current exhibition displays these early Burntworks publicly for the first time, alongside later collages and three metal sculptures, kicking off a centennial celebration of the artist's life that will culminate in a major exhibition at Dartmouth's Hood Museum in late 2027.
The inspiration Kaish found in nature is evident throughout her work, with references to the New Hampshire landscape in pieces like "Firepond I" and "Monadnock I," both from 1976. Fisher discovered sketchbooks from Kaish's MacDowell residency filled with drawings of flowers and birch trees that surrounded her studio, shapes that clearly influenced her abstract collages. Later painted Burntworks like "Aspen" from 1981 capture the spectacular color range of peak-foliage forests.
Kaish, like many artists of her era, was fascinated by outer space and was described by her daughter as "a NASA fanatic." This interest manifests in works like her 1977 collage "Creation," a five-foot-tall homage to celestial life force featuring a canvas disc resembling the sun with segmented rays radiating outward. Another standout piece, "Poet in Two Worlds (Deep Space)" from 1978, which Fisher calls "one of her major, major works," began as a monochromatic piece similar to the early MacDowell Burntworks but was later filled with blues ranging from robin's egg to royal, with yellow accents highlighting the burnt orb at its center.
The exhibition also features "Cosmos with Unborn Planet," a small bronze sculpture from 1970 created during Kaish's prestigious residency at the American Academy in Rome, where she received studio visits from Philip Guston and Buckminster Fuller. By that time, Kaish was already well-established in the art world, having been included in multiple Whitney Biennials and the influential 1959 "Recent Sculpture U.S.A." show at the Museum of Modern Art alongside Ruth Asawa and Alexander Calder. She had also been the subject of solo exhibitions at both the Sculpture Center and the Jewish Museum – impressive accomplishments for any mid-career artist, especially for a woman working in the male-dominated world of 20th-century American sculpture.
Born Luise Meyers in Atlanta in 1925, Kaish grew up primarily in Flushing, Queens, after her family moved there in 1930. She studied at Syracuse University, where she met Morton while ice-skating, completing her bachelor's degree in 1946. A postgraduate traveling fellowship took her to Mexico instead of war-torn Europe, where Mexico City's hotbed of radical thinking and artistic experimentation profoundly influenced her. She studied art history with Diego Rivera, joined a choir, and rode with the Mexican Olympic team before returning to Syracuse for her MFA under acclaimed Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović.
After marrying Morton in 1948 (she warned him during his proposal that "the white-picket-fence life was not for her"), both artists worked in fashion illustration while saving money to travel through Europe. The 1950s and 1960s brought Kaish steady commissions, often from temples and churches for religious-themed modernist sculptures, and exhibitions in galleries and museums across the United States. By the late 1970s, she was a well-respected name in the art world, and in 1980, she was appointed chair of the painting and sculpture program at Columbia University.
Kaish maintained a deep connection to spirituality, particularly Jewish mysticism, writing that "the Bible – the Zohar – the [Kabbalah] have been sources of poetic and symbolic imagery" for her work. While her early figurative sculptures like "The Great Blessing of Abraham" and "Angel of Joshua" were overtly religious, her abstract Burntworks feel equally reverent. Art historian Norman L. Kleeblatt suggests in Kaish's 2021 monograph that the kabbalistic notion of "breaking of the vessels" and the concept of "tikkun" (healing the world) were highly relevant to both the physical creation and psychological foundations of the Burntworks.
The exhibition reveals how Kaish may have been attempting to heal through her art, layering strips of charred material in works like "Monadnock I," where large rectangular patches of raw canvas are positioned like bandages applied to stem bleeding. By balancing destructive fire with pristine counterparts, she created harmony between light and dark. For a 1981 exhibition catalog at Staempfli gallery, Kaish wrote: "I like ambiguity, I like clarity. With the Burntworks I found paths to both – I like to think of these landscape collages as brief poems, as worlds in themselves, where through the very smallness of a window, we can glimpse the stars of the universe."
"Luise Kaish: Fire on the Mountain" runs from October 28 to 31 at MacDowell NYC, located at 521 West 23rd Street, offering visitors a rare opportunity to witness the powerful testament to a pivotal moment in one artist's creative evolution.
