“Donna Dodson: Match of the Matriarchs” Museum for Art in Wood

Begin­ning Novem­ber 6, the Museum for Art in Wood (141 N. 3rd Street, Philadel­phia, PA 19106) presents Donna Dodson: Match of the Matri­archs, featur­ing a 24-foot, chess­board compris­ing 32 monu­men­tal, movable pieces hand-carved from reclaimed wood. Created by Mass­a­chu­setts-based sculp­tor Donna Dodson, the exhi­bi­tion invites visi­tors to observe an acti­vated chess match compris­ing all-female pieces modeled after femi­nine arche­types, mythic figures, aquatic crea­tures, and the power­ful matri­archs in the artist’s family. Dodson’s sculp­tural work in wood is comple­mented by video and photo­graphic works by Philadel­phia-based Women’s National Chess Cham­pion and author Jennifer Shahade. Match of the Matri­archs is on display in the Museum’s main gallery from Novem­ber 6, 2026, through March 14, 2027.

Donna Dodson is an inter­na­tion­ally recog­nized sculp­tor known for creat­ing monu­men­tal figu­ra­tive wood­carv­ings that chal­lenge tradi­tional hier­ar­chies of power. For Match of the Matri­archs, Dodson was inspired to create a one-of-a-kind chess set, model­ing the pieces after marine life and New England’s history of carved wooden figure­heads on whaling vessels. Often depict­ing goddesses, mermaids, or captains’ wives, figure­head carv­ings prompted Dodson to consider how to trans­form mermaids from hyper­sex­u­al­ized objects of the male gaze into a woman-sea crea­ture hybrid, evoking the power of marine mammals. Previ­ously exhib­ited at the World Chess Hall of Fame in St. Louis and the Boston Sculp­tors Gallery, Match of the Matri­archs evolves at the Museum for Art in Wood through new sculp­tures, expanded program­ming, and performance.

While matri­ar­chal power and marine life shaped the figures in the exhibition’s initial presen­ta­tion, Dodson contin­ued to create new chess pieces, which will debut in the Museum for Art in Wood’s instal­la­tion. Expand­ing on Match of the Matriarch’s explo­ration of binary power dynam­ics, Dodson drew on history, mythol­ogy, and personal connec­tions to create figures that chal­lenge expec­ta­tions of women’s roles. 

“I want my audi­ence to consider a world filled with power­ful women,” said Dodson. ​“An all-female chess set seems like an apt metaphor for this worldview.”

As viewers enter the Museum’s gallery, they’ll find the exhibition’s monu­men­tal chess set, with 32 chess figures compris­ing the game pieces. The effect takes the famil­iar expe­ri­ence of having a bird’s‑eye view of a chess­board and trans­forms it into an immer­sive one as players must move among the sculp­tures, presented at eye level, encoun­ter­ing the posi­tions and rela­tion­ships of the pieces from within the game itself. Strat­egy becomes a phys­i­cal expe­ri­ence as viewers navi­gate an imag­ined strug­gle among chess queens, warriors, and goddesses.

Dodson fully real­ized her vision by adding 16 hand-carved pawns and two new Grim Reaper knights for the black side of the Matriarch’s chess­board. She also fabri­cated a floor-mounted chess set 10 times the size of the stan­dard Staunton tour­na­ment set, devoted to Caissa, the goddess of chess, in which the queens are the largest pieces on the board. This set lends itself to Philadel­phia chess players drop­ping in and playing chess vari­ants like Double Queen chess or Caïssa Britan­nica (British Chess). 

Posi­tioned around the central chess match stand nine, wood-carved goddesses, each bearing her own attrib­utes and accou­ter­ments signi­fy­ing her iden­tity and history. The nine goddesses corre­spond with the value of the queen, or the queen’s equal in pawns, which is also the maximum number of queens that a player can have at any one time through promoted pawns. The impor­tance of numbers in this game of strat­a­gem and tacti­cal calcu­la­tion is present through­out the installation.

New for the exhi­bi­tion at the Museum for Art in Wood, ​“Goddess of Virtue Signal­ing” imag­ines an extinct Irish elk wearing a blaze orange set of antlers that signal to hunters not to shoot her. The sculp­ture honors the late art-world satirist Hilde Lynn Helphen­stein, known as Jerry Gagosian, pairing humor with a serious reflec­tion on humanity’s best and worst inten­tions. For her sculp­ture ​“The Mino­taur or Beat­rice Cenci for Harriet Hosmer,” Dodson reimag­ines Roman noble­woman Beat­rice Cenci, whose resis­tance to her abusive father made her a tragic cultural symbol, as a power­ful female mino­taur holding a severed head. Paying tribute to pioneer­ing sculp­tor Harriet Hosmer’s earlier depic­tion of Cenci, Dodson allows the black walnut’s natural beauty and partial decay to connect the mate­r­ial itself to the figure’s story.

Other sculp­tures bring the exhibition’s themes of strength, trans­for­ma­tion, and inter­gen­er­a­tional connec­tion into focus through women who defied prescribed roles. In ​“Tomboy,” Dodson repre­sents the legendary warrior Mulan as a muscu­lar rabbit, drawing on the heroine’s compar­i­son of male and female hares to ques­tion assump­tions about gender. The figure’s sturdy black shoes recall those worn by Dodson’s father, linking Mulan’s service in her father’s place to the artist’s own expe­ri­ence as his name­sake of stand­ing in her father’s shoes. ​“Fight & Flight” honors Laksh­mibai, the queen of Jhansi, who resisted British rule, with a sword in hand and her son secured to her back, a gesture that reminded Dodson of carry­ing her grand­chil­dren. Details echoing the colors and symbols of India’s flag cele­brate Lakshmibai’s legacy, bring­ing lead­er­ship, care­giv­ing, and resis­tance together in a single figure.

Dodson’s signa­ture use of reclaimed wood makes the material’s varied tones, grain, and scars inte­gral to each figure. These visible traces connect the sculp­tures to the histo­ries of the wood from which they were carved. Together, the figures recast chess as a setting for matri­ar­chal power, ecolog­i­cal symbol­ism, and wisdom passed between gener­a­tions, empha­siz­ing trans­for­ma­tion along­side the compe­ti­tion at the heart of the game.

Comple­ment­ing Dodson’s instal­la­tion are wood chess sets by other artists and works by Philadel­phia-based two-time United States Women’s Chess Cham­pion, FIDE Woman Grand­mas­ter, author, and histo­rian Jennifer Shahade, in collab­o­ra­tion with her film­maker husband Daniel Meirom. A nation­ally ranked chess cham­pion, Shahade brings a wry, inci­sive perspec­tive to women’s partic­i­pa­tion and visi­bil­ity in chess culture. 

In response to Marilyn Yalom’s book, Birth of the Chess Queen, Shahade created an inter­ac­tive chalk­board instal­la­tion, ​“Not Partic­u­larly Beau­ti­ful,” based on the historic chess­board, ​“Eschequier en forme d’Eve” (or ​“Chess in the form of Eve”) by French author Gratien du Pont. The infa­mous misog­y­nist illus­tra­tion was a protest against the 16th-century changes to chess rules that made the queen the most power­ful piece in the game. Outraged, du Pont drew a chess­board and penned 64 insults towards women in rhyming black and white squares that were published anony­mously in 1534. He even­tu­ally was outed for the prank while the queen’s signif­i­cance remained a perma­nent fixture in modern chess. In response to du Pont’s anti-femi­nist protest, Shahade created a board in which the white squares were filled with trolling comments from her social media, invit­ing audi­ence partic­i­pa­tion to fill in the rest. Several vari­a­tions of ​“Not Partic­u­larly Beau­ti­ful” have been exhib­ited since then, evolv­ing into its current iter­a­tion, where viewers are encour­aged to write empow­er­ing messages to girls and women instead.

The Museum presents special program­ming to further engage visi­tors around the work on display in its galleries. On Novem­ber 6, from 5 to 8 p.m., visi­tors can attend the First Friday opening recep­tion of Match of the Matri­archs to enjoy extended hours and meet Dodson to ask ques­tions about her work. Visi­tors can also partic­i­pate in a Gallery Talk on Novem­ber 7, from 11 a.m. to noon, where Dodson will share insights into her artis­tic prac­tice and work on display in the exhi­bi­tion. On Novem­ber 13, from 6 to 8 p.m., the Museum hosts chess cham­pion and author Jennifer Shahade for a Game Night and Book Signing, featur­ing her book Think­ing Side­ways, invit­ing visi­tors to explore the exhibition’s connec­tions to chess and creative thinking.

Beyond Match of the Matri­archs, Dodson has partic­i­pated in numer­ous resi­den­cies and been exhib­ited around the world. A grad­u­ate of Welles­ley College, she has completed success­ful resi­den­cies in Verbier, Switzer­land, Cusco, Peru, Keelung, Taiwan, and Denmark. Dodson is currently a Scholar at the Bran­deis Univer­sity Women’s Studies Research Center and a former Visual Art Fellow at the St. Botolph Club in Boston. She was a 2022 Fulbright US Scholar at Q21/​MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, Austria, working as an artist-in-resi­dence with her host insti­tu­tion Tricky Women/​Tricky Real­i­ties, the world’s only anima­tion festi­val for women. Dodson has won grants from the Puffin Foun­da­tion, Mass­a­chu­setts Cultural Council, the New Hamp­shire Guild of Wood­work­ers, and the George Sugar­man Foun­da­tion. Her work is in the perma­nent collec­tion of the World Chess Hall of Fame in St. Louis, Missouri, the Province­town Art Museum, the Art Complex Museum, and the Fuller Craft Museum in Mass­a­chu­setts, the Noyes Art Museum in New Jersey, and the Davis­town Museum in Maine. Donna’s work has been reviewed in the Boston Globe, Sculp­ture Maga­zine, The Daily Beast, Hyper­al­ler­gic, and Artnet. Dodson is