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October 15 – 19, 2025
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Dorothy Antoinette “Toni” LaSelle was an American Modernist painter and educator who was born in Beatrice, Nebraska in 1901 and died in Denton, Texas in 2002. Her artistic career spanned 7 decades! Profoundly influenced by images of the works included in the 1913 Armory Show, LaSelle was an early and intuitive student of modernism. In the 1940s, she sought out and studied with European emigrés Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Hans Hofmann. Moholy-Nagy laid the groundwork for LaSelle’s interest in geometry and shapes, while Hofmann’s color theories influenced her space compositions. In New York and Provincetown in the late 1940s through the early 1960s, LaSelle was a witness to and participant in the American Modernist revolution.
Working closely with the artist's foundation, Inman Gallery is proud to present the work of this influential Texas-based modernist.
September 5 - December 14, 2025
Dorothy Antoinette LaSelle: Space Movements
Elder gallery
Nebraska Wesleyan University
“My drawings are Space and Movement Compositions. They can also be called Space-Time drawings. The plane of the paper, the planes in the drawings, and the space in the drawings are all one thing. They cannotbe separated. It takes all three together to create a plastic unit out of a flat piece of paper.”
-Dallas Morning News, March 14, 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. 2022, 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 ofgeometric 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 Museumof Art and her work was also included in a show at the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi (2022).
“If students ask about the nature of my paintings, I say:
Do not look for things, take a journey on the shapes Keep moving with your eyes—these are not designs—stay in action. Go with the directionsof the color planes.”
-Toni LaSelle, on the occasion of her first solo exhibition at the Elder Gallery, 1967.
This exhibition has been made possible by the generosity of the Dorothy Antoinette LaSelle Foundation and Inman Gallery. Elder Gallery is located inside the Vance D. Rogers Center for Fine Arts at the corner of 50th and Huntington Streets on the Nebraska Wesleyan University campus. The gallery is free and open to the public. Elder Gallery hours are Friday -Sunday, 1-4pm and by appointment.