When Prune Nourry recalls the moment when it all began, she is standing in the sculpture gallery of the Petit Palais—the soaring, light-filled hall just past the museum’s entrance that she calls her “dream room.” Before her rises a monumental portrait of a woman she once was unable to place, the subject a feminist activist whose story she’d never known. Steps away stands a towering work made by a woman whose name she had never learned—despite being born and raised in Paris and trained at the École Boulle, the city’s revered craft school. “How come I don’t know about them?” she asks. “It started like that—like a question mark.”
A number: Barely 4 percent of the works in the Petit Palais collection were made by women, and among its hundreds of sculptures, only four female sculptors are represented. Nourry knew only two of them. A third artist she recognized for entirely different reasons. “I thought she was an actress,” she says of Sarah Bernhardt. “I had no idea she had done sculpture, too.”
Her response to this inequity is “Visionaries,” which runs from October 20 to Jan. 24, 2027, at the Petit Palais. The museum gave Nourry, 41, carte blanche to sculpt portraits of 18 fellow female sculptors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—Käthe Kollwitz, Camille Claudel, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, and Jane Poupelet among them—women who worked, exhibited, and wrote, and were then quietly erased from history. Their busts, ranging from 2.3 to 11.5 feet tall, will stand amid the museum’s permanent collection, alongside some 20 of Nourry’s earlier works.
Nourry at work in her Paris studio.
The show is also a homecoming. Nourry has spent nearly two decades interrogating how societies value—and devalue—the female body, beginning with her 2009 work “Holy Daughters,” a meditation on gender preference set in India. One of her best-known works, “Terracotta Daughters”—an army of 108 life-size sculpted girls inspired by China’s Terracotta Warriors, representing the daughters left unborn by a culture’s preference for sons—lies buried in mainland China until 2030, a contemporary archaeological site awaiting a world that might receive them differently. Anthropology, bioethics, and medicine run through everything she makes, usually in collaboration with scientists, historians, and craftspeople she treats as co-conspirators.
Nourry begins not with clay but with research. “When I start a project, I always want to learn about my subject from experts who have been doing it all their lives—digest the facts, then transform them into something more poetic,” she says. For “Visionaries,” she engaged three art historians specializing in women artists of the period, and for a year they played what she calls “ping-pong,” assembling a dossier of some 30 to 40 candidates.
What the research unearthed still stuns her. Women were barred from the École des Beaux-Arts—a public school—until activists like sculptor Hélène Bertaux forced it open; in the meantime, only private academies or studio lessons from established artists were available to those who could pay. Nancy Elizabeth Prophet arrived in Paris from New York and went two weeks with barely anything to eat, spending all the money she had on materials. Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, whose work helped inspire the Harlem Renaissance, was told by her husband to focus on the children; her life’s work was later destroyed in a storage fire. “These stories are about resilience,” Nourry says. “About passion, strength, and the will to create.”
“It’s the idea of truly looking at the past to reflect on the future.”
The anonymous women haunted her the most: the students who appear in period photographs of sculpture ateliers, who trained seriously and then vanished into family obligations, without so much as a bank account of their own. For them, Nourry created “The Students”—at 11.5 feet, tied with her portrait of Prophet as the tallest bust in the show—a portrait in negative, a mold, holding the shape of everyone history declined to name.
Sculpting the named women posed its own puzzle: Most of the artists’ faces are barely documented. Each portrait required at least two usable photographs—often pixelated, often only frontal, sometimes taken decades apart.
Nourry made the monumental works in a borrowed studio, a raw construction space inside the Saint-Denis Pleyel station of the Grand Paris Express, where her Venus sculptures will hang next spring on a nearly 89-foot wall. Most mornings, she bikes to Line 14, rides the train to the end, and changes into a hard hat, a yellow vest, and construction boots before joining her team—young sculptors freshly graduated from École Boulle, her alma mater, and Franck Barboiron, the self-taught master molder she met at a bronze foundry in Auvergne in her twenties. Their daily adversaries: pigeons and dust.
“Mothership,” an outdoor scuplture, under construction.
One of the 18 works hits her differently. Marie Bashkirtseff, the Ukrainian artist, died of tuberculosis at 25 and seemed to know she would die young—she produced ferociously, as if trying to outrace her own prognosis. Nourry feels the kinship keenly: In 2016, at 31, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, enduring two years of treatment—chronicled with unsparing candor in Serendipity, the 2019 documentary she directed about the experience, executive-produced by Angelina Jolie and Darren Aronofsky. “I was lucky—I survived, where she couldn’t. At her time, I wouldn’t have,” she says. “It’s the idea of truly looking at the past to reflect on the present.”
That reflection begins before visitors even enter, with “Mothership”—a colossal figure—standing outside the museum. Inside, eyes of white Carrara and black French marble, embedded in Nourry’s busts and hidden on pedestals throughout the collection, return the gaze of anyone who finds them. Visitors will hear the women, too, through excerpts of their journals and letters, read aloud by Marion Cotillard in French and Janelle Monáe in English.
Nourry resists placing herself in their lineage—or speculating on which of her own works will outlive her. “When you create, you create from your gut,” she says. “I want to be inspired, not anxious.” She won’t slow down, regardless: A show at the Musée Camille Claudel outside Paris opens in March 2027, with Château La Coste and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art to follow in 2028. Ask what she hopes a young woman carries out of the Petit Palais, and she doesn’t hesitate. “Dedication,” she says. “An idea only belongs to the person who makes it.”
This story appears in the November 2026 issue of ELLE.