Contemporary Art at the Folger
From October 2025 to April 2026, the Folger is hosting small solo exhibitions featuring the work of four recent Artist Fellows at the Folger Institute, the center for advanced research in the early modern humanities at the Folger. The four artists will give talks at the Folger during the run of their exhibition.
Leah Thomas
Leah Thomas is the Public Humanities Program Manager for the Folger Institute, where she oversees the Artistic Research Fellowship program and manages the Institute’s public humanities offerings such as Folger Salon and Mixology. With ten years of museum and public humanities experience, Leah has also worked at the Smithsonian and completed an MA in early modern art history at UNC Chapel Hill. Connect on LinkedIn to learn more about her work.
About Folger Artist Fellows
Each year, the Folger Shakespeare Library awards fellowships to artists whose creative work encompasses research on the stories, art, and objects in the Folger’s collection.
Elise Ansel
October 3–November 9, 2025
While “Old Master” paintings were largely created by men for men, Elise Ansel disrupts this viewpoint by creating feminist translations in oil paint. By employing the open-ended visual languages of color and abstraction, she creates new ways of looking and engaging for modern viewers. As a fellow, Ansel deploys this framework to reinterpret Henry Fuseli’s Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head (1793), held in the Folger collection.
On View: Elise Ansel
Gallery Talk: Elise Ansel
Missy Dunaway
November 14, 2025–January 4, 2026
Blending acrylic ink with research, Missy Dunaway investigates the connections between art, literature, history, and the natural world. Her ongoing project The Birds of Shakespeare visually catalogs every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays and poems—at least 65 species—in consultation with an ornithologist and a scholar of early modern natural history. Dunaway’s detailed work reminds us that wildlife destruction is a cultural loss as well as an environmental one.
On View: Missy Dunaway
Gallery Talk: Missy Dunaway
Dominick Porras
January 9–February 15, 2026
Growing up in a detribalized community along the Rio Grande has profoundly shaped Dominick Porras’ identity as a Chicano artist. His photography and new media installations bridge past and future as vessels for exploring the rich tapestry of his heritage. By pairing historical research on the travels of 16th century Spanish colonizer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca with his own linguistic and cultural knowledge of the Coahuiltecan peoples, Porras complicates ideas of contact, survival, and transformation.
Mandy Cano Villalobos
February 20–April 5, 2026
Self-dubbed a “cultural scrapper,” Mandy Cano Villalobos harnesses the leftover materials of home, belonging, and cultural identity. Using everything from broken jewelry and orphaned toys to stained clothing, her mixed-media textiles take inspiration from the luxurious designs of embroidered bindings in the Folger collection and re-create them with the relics of modern capitalist excess. Cano Villalobos uses this juxtaposition to draw attention to the lasting legacies of injustice and environmental damage that are a consequence of early modern colonization and empire building.
Related exhibition and talk
Alexander D’Agostino
Talk: April 26, 2026
Artist Fellow Alexander D’Agostino will give a talk at the Folger on April 26, 2026, in support of his upcoming exhibition at Transformer DC. D’Agostino uses embodied research practices such as performance and tarot divination to create new myths and rituals that pay homage to the marginalized LGBTQ+ people of the past. At the Folger, his research focuses on V.b.26, an enigmatic, handwritten grimoire, or book of magic, in our collection known for its depictions of the Fairy King, Oberon. D’Agostino uses the secretive imagery, spells, and spirits of the grimoire to bring queer history and culture, from early modern to present, into the public eye.
All related events
More events will be added to this list as details are finalized. Please see the individual artists above for exhibition dates. Each artist will give a gallery talk.
On View: Elise Ansel
Gallery Talk: Elise Ansel