Modern Woman
The National Gallery of Art reached out with an irresistible invitation: would we help remake a lost mural?
A selection of prints by Mary Cassatt
In 1893, Mary Cassatt — the American-born French Impressionist known for her luminous palette and intimate portraits of women — was commissioned to create a monumental mural for the Women’s Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Not long after the fair closed, the mural disappeared.
Cassatt’s theme was the passing of the “fruits of knowledge” from one generation to the next.
Reimagining her lost work gave us the opportunity to live out that idea. We collaborated with a group of middle and high school students who lost their school in the Eaton Fire last year. Together, we explored what it means to carry knowledge forward, to rebuild, and to create something out of loss.
To bring Cassatt’s composition into today, we began with a workshop with the students, talking through themes in Cassatt's mural — fame, knowledge, self-expression — and asked what those ideas mean now. Their reflections were thoughtful, nuanced, and surprisingly aligned with questions Cassatt was asking more than a century ago.
We brought clippings of fire-following plants for them to paint in person. Those paintings are woven into the symbolic border that frames the central triptych. They spoke lovingly about the sunflower garden at their former school — so sunflowers found their way into the mural too.
We painted together on the one-year anniversary of the Eaton Fire. Loss — and what endures — moved through the entire process. What do we carry forward? What do we replant? What do we choose to remake?
We hope Mary Cassatt would be proud.
Modern Woman by Mary Cassatt, 1893
Studio Tutto & Aveson Students, Modern Woman, 2026
