Benigna Chilla (Germany/US) & Estate of Nancy Hemenway Barton (US, 1920—2008)

July 10, 2026 – August 27, 2026

Sapar Contemporary is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition by Benigna Chilla (Germany/US) and Nancy Hemenway Barton (US, 1920-2008). The exhibition brings together original bodies of work that these two women artists created in the relative isolation of their studios in upstate New York and on the coast of Maine. The works on view were made in the 1990s and 2000s and are shown for the first time in New York. Nancy Hemenway Barton, who was a subject of a major retrospective at the Denver Art Museum last year, worked from her studio on a tiny island off Boothbay Harbor in Maine, where she developed a textile practice that was unlike those of her contemporaries. She called it “bayetage.” Barton, who was also a poet, used textiles and embroidery as collage or drawing to create lyrical textured compositions, sometimes abstract and soulful, and sometimes tentatively figurative. Benigna Chilla, educated in Berlin by Bauhaus instructors, has been working in her studio in Chatham, NY, since she moved to the US in the late 1960s. This particular body of work involves her original exploration of the printing process: she layers painted screens to create dynamic abstract compositions that are not prints, paintings, or wall sculptures. They defy definition and intrigue the viewer’s eye. Her formal inspiration comes not only from European and American abstraction but from ancient textile and sacred geometry of archaeological sites. Chilla has spoken  and published about her observation and theories on the relationship between mathematics and art in ancient patterns and in her own practice.

Benigna Chilla (Hamburg, Germany, 1940) began her studies in Germany at the Folkwangschule für Gestaltung in Essen. She studied a broad range of skills, from typesetting to drawing, sculpture and printmaking. Chilla received her “Meisterschüler” in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin in 1968.

Chilla emigrated to the United States in 1969, settling in Chatham, NY. Having studied with Bauhaus professors in Germany, Chilla’s initial encounters with Minimalism in America sparked an engagement with principles of planar geometry around 1970; and her intuitive and personal pursuit of form and order would guide her practice for the rest of her career. For practical reasons, Chilla undertook further graduate studies at the State University of New York, Albany and University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the early 1970s. She had access to printing presses but limited resources, and she repurposed fragments of other artists’ discarded plates to create her work. Never interested in editions, Chilla transformed her prints into unique sculptural forms, beginning a decades-long, pioneering exploration of the conversation between two and three-dimensionality in art that continued with her optical paintings on layered screens from the 1980s until the early 2000s. By the 1990s, Chilla began to circulate her observations and theories on the relationship between mathematics and art, publishing in academic journals and presenting her work at conferences globally.

In the past decade, Chilla has returned to working principally on large canvases, building her ideas in paint and with remnants of textiles, which she uses both to create texture and as a material adhered to the surface. Increasingly, the artist’s color-block forms, iconometric compositions, and even the scroll-like formats of her work reflect the importance of the time she has spent in Asia to her practice. 

Chilla has held residencies at Yaddo, the Djerassi Foundation, the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Her works can be seen publicly in collections globally including Flaten Art Museum, St. Olaf College, MN; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, NY; Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY; University at Albany Fine Art Museum, Albany, NY; Museum Modern Art, Hünfeld, Germany; Negev Museum, Beersheva, Israel; University of Buenos Aires, FADU, Argentina; University Museum of Toluca, Mexico; Oomoto Foundation, Kameoka, Japan. She has had over forty solo exhibitions both in the United States and internationally.

Nancy Hemenway Barton (1920–2008) was an American artist celebrated for her pioneering work in textiles and mixed media, blending traditional techniques with innovative approaches to create evocative tapestries. Born in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, she initially pursued music and literature, graduating from Wheaton College in 1941 on a music scholarship, studying composition at Harvard University, and earning a Master's degree in Spanish lyric poetry from Columbia University. Her artistic journey began with watercolors depicting landscapes and portraits, evolving into oil paintings of still lifes, portraits, and abstracts after training at the Art Students League of New York in 1957. This foundation in diverse mediums laid the groundwork for her later explorations in form, color, and cultural narratives.

Barton's signature style emerged in 1966 while living in La Paz, Bolivia, where she developed "bayetage," a unique method combining flower-dyed wool, bayeta, and collage elements to produce sculptural tapestries. Inspired by local South American Indigenous cultures and natural landscapes, her works often celebrated themes of light, space, and the rugged shores of Maine, using materials like lambswool, linen, mohair, alpaca, and karakul. She held over 20 solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Edinburgh City Art Centre. Her tapestries toured museums in seven Asian countries and were featured in a 1970 U.S. Information Agency film at the Pan American Union, highlighting her global influence.

Throughout her career, Barton received numerous accolades, including residencies at the Cummington Foundation and fellowships at the American Academy in Rome and the Djerassi Foundation. She was honored as a Deborah Morton Outstanding Maine Woman by Westbrook College and awarded an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from Wheaton College. Barton also lectured extensively in Africa under U.S. Information Agency auspices and with a National Endowment for the Arts grant, while mentoring young women artists and advocating for women's rights. Her legacy endures through publications such as poetry collections, journals, and exhibition catalogues like "Aqua Lapis" and "Embroidered Wall Sculptures," with her creative process preserved by the Hemenway Foundation. A 2017 retrospective, "Ahead of Her Time," at the University of New England Gallery underscored her forward-thinking contributions to textile art.

Nancy Hemenway Barton's innovative tapestries and mixed-media works are held in the permanent collections of several prestigious institutions, reflecting her lasting impact on textile art. These include The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, holding "Aqua Lapis VIII"), the Art Institute of Chicago (Illinois, with pieces like "Ascent"), the Farnsworth Art Museum (Maine), the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (California), the Birmingham Museum of Art (Alabama, including "Confluence II"), the Portland Museum of Art (Maine), the Denver Art Museum (Colorado, featuring "Epiphyte"), the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minnesota), and Wheaton College (Massachusetts). Additionally, Barton has a major upcoming retrospective at the Denver Art Museum.