SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 | 1–2 PM: Join us for an artist talk between Fraleigh and Michelle White, Senior Curator at the Menil Collection.

Angela Fraleigh’s newest paintings enter the charged terrain of the feral feminine, unleashing a cast of unruly figures animated by desire, instinct, and an irrepressible appetite. Maenads, witches, and animals emerge and recede through lush layers of paint, carrying an energy that shifts between the ecstatic and the intimate, the violent and the tender. Fire runs through the work not simply as an element, but as a condition: flame, fever, intensity, slow burn, illumination, and the heat through which one thing becomes another. Guided by a logic closer to ritual than narrative, Fraleigh approaches painting as a form of alchemy, allowing images to collide, dissolve, and transmute.

EXHIBIT ON VIEW SEPTEMBER 12–OCTOBER 31, 2026

Drawn in part from works in Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the Menil Collection, fragments of art history become material to be summoned, disrupted, and recast, creating a quiet dialogue with the city’s collections. The resulting works operate like spells themselves. Lush and volatile, the paintings ask what becomes possible when the familiar slips its boundaries and something wild emerges.