08/29/2025
“My drawings are Space and Movement Compositions. They can also be called Space-Time drawings. “
-Toni LaSelle, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1948.
Nebraska Wesleyan University’s Elder Gallery is pleased to present Dorothy Antoinette LaSelle Space Movements. The exhibition will be open September 5th - December 14th with a reception and curator tour October 3rd.
Dorothy Antoinette “Toni” LaSelle (b. 1901, Beatrice, NE, d. 2002, Denton, TX) is one of Texas’ most celebrated modernist painters. Having been exposed to European modernism in college at Nebraska Wesleyan where she received a BA in 1923, she went on to study at the University of Chicago, receiving an MA in Art History in 1926. Subsequent studies in Europe before World War ll and then in the US with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Hans Hofmann in the 1940s cemented her modernist credentials. From the 1950s onward until the 1990s, LaSelle practiced her own unique style of geometric abstraction, characterized by bold color and enthusiastic paint application. From the 1960s on, she increasingly worked on paper, in series, using oil pastel, watercolor and ink. Not unheralded in her lifetime, she had solo exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (now the Dallas Museum of Art) in 1948, in New York at the Rose Fried Gallery (1950) and at the Fort Worth Art Center (now The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) in 1959, among others. More recently, she was included in the exhibition “Texas Women: A New History of Abstract Art” at the San Antonio Museum of Art and her work was also included in a show at the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi (2022).
Image 1:
Space Movements, Still Life, 1946
oil on canvas, vintage frame
24 x 18 inches
24 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches framed
Photo: Allyson Huntsman
Image 2:
Space Movements, Still Life, 1946
oil on canvas, vintage frame
24 x 17 3/4 in (61 x 45.1 cm)
24 3/4 x 18 5/8 in (62.9 x 47.3 cm) framed
Image: Michael O'Brien, Jake Eshelman
This exhibition has been made possible by the generosity of the Dorothy Antoinette LaSelle Foundation, Inman Gallery, Leah Bennett, and Marlene Marker.
