Suzanne Valadon Exhibition
Exhibition identity, exhibition graphics, printShe modeled for Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Degas, artists who looked at her, painted her, objectified her, and then she picked up a brush herself. Suzanne Valadon (1865–1938) is one of art history's great acts of reversal: from subject to maker, from Montmartre model to the first self-taught woman admitted to the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Suzanne Valadon: Model, Painter, Rebel, curated by Nancy Ireson and presented in the Barnes Foundation Museum's Roberts Gallery from September 2021 through January 2022, was her first major US exhibition, 54 paintings, drawings, and prints spanning nearly five decades, confrontational and unsparing. Her figures are stubbornly present. Her nudes refuse to please. Her gaze is entirely her own.
That push-pull, between the feminine and the brazen, between the world's expectations of Valadon and her own, is the exhibition's animating tension, and it became the design's. Exhibition materials pair Canela with Plakat: one soft and editorial, the other bold and declarative, the two typefaces held in productive friction. The intro wall was hand-lettered by sign painter Gibbs Connors over a ground of limewash rather than conventional latex, a choice made in deliberate sympathy with Valadon's own practice. Her paintings show the artist's hand everywhere, in visible brushstrokes, in texture, in the raw canvas that peeks through in places as though the work is still becoming itself. The limewash answers that: soft, dreamy, its color varying slightly across the surface, nothing sealed or resolved. A wall painted by hand for an artist whose hand is never absent from hers.
+ Type: Plakat by Out of the Dark, Canela by Commercial Type
+ Art Direction: Olivia Verdugo
+ Graphic Design: Olivia Verdugo, Pauline Nyren
+ Curator: Nancy Ireson
+ Exhibition design: Yaumu Huang
© 2026 Olivia S Verdugo