BOHEMIÉNNE: a group exhibition at the Arts League of Philadelphia curated by Jo Gamel and Jessica Libor, open to visual artists, writers and publishers.

This is a physical exhibition to be exhibited at the Arts League of Philadelphia.

Important exhibition dates:

• Submission deadline: Sunday, August 30, 2026 | 11:59 PM

• Notifications sent by: Friday, September 11, 2026

• Drop off window: Monday–Wednesday, September 21–23, 2026, 11 to 3pm each day at the Arts League of Philadelphia

• Exhibition on view at the Arts League of Philadelphia: October 2nd- October 22nd, 2026

• Opening Reception: Friday, October 2, 2026 | 5:30–8:30 PM

• Preview night with curator - Thursday, Oct 1, 6:30-8:30 pm

• Closing reception: Thursday, October 22, 2026

• Deinstallation: Friday–Sunday, October 23–25, 2026

Statement from the curators:

Bohémienne exhibition explores Bohemia as a transhistorical state of mind: a timeless creative ethos where freedom, beauty, imagination, and artistic courage transcend convention. Bringing together visual art, literature, and print culture, the exhibition traces this enduring spirit from nineteenth-century Paris and Poe's Philadelphia to contemporary artists and writers who continue to shape culture through lives devoted to creative expression.

The term Bohemian entered European languages in the 15th century as the French word Bohémien. The French believed that the Romani people had come from the Kingdom of Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), although this was historically incorrect. Because of this mistaken association, bohémien came to signify someone who lived outside conventional society.

By the nineteenth century, the meaning shifted dramatically. Rather than referring to ethnicity, at this time it came to mean artists, poets, musicians, writers, actors, and intellectuals who deliberately rejected bourgeois values in favor of creativity, beauty, intellectual freedom, romance, and communal living.

The decisive moment came in 1845 when the French writer  Henri Murger wrote Scènes de la vie de Bohème, romanticizing the artistic and unconventional  life in Paris's Latin Quarter. Murger's stories became one of the defining myths of the modern artist.

Those stories later inspired La Bohème, Moulin Rouge!, and Rent, among many other works of art.

Bohémienne exhibition goes beyond decorative style or a historical period into its deeper underpinnings of self-invention and resistance to prescribed ways of living.

Bohémienne moves across history as a prism scattered across different geographies but bound together by a spirit of striking creativity: from Kafka’s Prague and Josephine Baker’s Paris to Jimi Hendrix’s electric San Francisco and Edgar Allan Poe’s Philadelphia, and the countless creatives inspired by the concept. These places and figures form a constellation of Bohemia, linked by the instinct to create a life and artistic body that is unconventional. This exhibition brings together mixed-media, multidisciplinary, and multitalented artists whose work resists singular definitions of practice, identity, beauty, or success.

Examples of Bohemian painters are Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who lived among performers and cabaret entertainers in Montmarte, Paris and who is famous for his free-flowing paintings and lithographs depicting the energetic showbiz lifestyle that were used on so many showbills at the turn of the century.  Suzanne Valado was one of the first major female painters to emerge from Montmarte's Bohemian community, beginning as an artist's model for Renoir, Degas, and Toulouse-Lautrec before becoming a celebrated painter herself.  She embodied artistic independence long before women were widely accepted as professional painters.  Edgar Degas, although more of a bougeois personally, documented the world of dancers and performers that defined Parisian Bohemia in his sketches and paintings.  Pierre-Auguste Renoir's paintings of cafe's and outdoor gatherings helped crystalize the social atmosphere of artistic Paris, such as Luncheon of the Boating Party.  Vincent van Gogh became the ultimate symbol of the artist living outside conventional society, his letters revealing his mindset of complete dedication to artistic truth.

Writers associated with the Bohemian ideal are Edgar Allen Poe, especially in his Philadelphia years, for his counter-cultural way of living and writing.  Oscar Wilde, Anais Nin, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley all epitomized unconventional choices and exploration of the deepest underpinnings of the imagination in their works.

In music, the famous performer Josephine Baker transformed her stage presence into a curated icon of Bohemia, and Edith Piaf penned songs of love and longing that resonate with us even today.  David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix and Florence Welch exemplify more current interpretations of a bohemian presence.

Across centuries, the Bohemian is an archetypal figure who chooses imagination over conformity and beauty over utility. The idea of the Bohemian transcends the city of Paris and extends to a way of  creating that appears wherever artists, writers, musicians, and visionaries gather to invent new ways of living and making. Bohémienne exhibition asks what becomes possible when patterns of convention are interrupted, rearranged, or abandoned. The past inspires new compositions, painted with freedom, collaged and illuminated through contemporary experience.

The works move along a spectrum of discipline and abandon, private ritual and collective life, transgenerational inheritance and chosen identity. Together, they form a kaleidoscope rather than prescribing a single definition or submitting to one authority of taste, correctness, or value. Bohemianism emerges as an instinctual impulse toward self-authorship: the freedom to define one’s own measures of beauty, achievement, belonging, and success. It is the freedom not merely to break the rules, but to recognize that many of them were never immutable, and to author the terms of one’s own life.

Featured artwork: The Blue Room by Suzanne Valadon, public domain.