In a unique collaboration, artist Prune Nourry and Google Arts & Culture have teamed up to bring attention to 18 underappreciated female sculptors through the new ‘Visionaries’ exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris. This project employs generative artificial intelligence to recreate the lost studios of 19th-century sculptors, highlighting the historical erasure of women from the art world. The exhibition is open from October 20, 2026, to January 30, 2027, and is complemented by an online documentary.
The histories of many talented women who worked as sculptors in Paris have often been overlooked. Prune Nourry is harnessing AI technology to digitally reconstruct their studios and revitalize their stories. These recreated spaces offer an interactive experience, allowing visitors to explore how these women lived and worked, effectively showcasing how they have been unjustly excluded from history.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, numerous skilled female sculptors made their mark in Paris despite societal constraints and limited access to formal training. Historically, women were primarily depicted as models or muses, rather than as artists in their own right.
Opening on October 20, the ‘Visionaries’ exhibition coincides with Art Basel Paris at the Petit Palais. It features large plaster portraits sculpted by Prune Nourry, honoring 18 historical female sculptors and preserving their creative legacies.
To further explore these women’s lives, Prune Nourry and Google Arts & Culture worked with film director Vincent Lorca on a 10-minute documentary. The film draws on a year’s worth of research, during which three art historians collected letters, diaries, and portraits of female sculptors active in Paris. In the absence of many historical photographs of their workspaces, Lynn Cherny, a creative technologist at Google Arts & Culture Lab, utilized Google’s generative AI to recreate studios of artists like Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Jane Poupelet, and Camille Claudel.
A custom tool built with Google Gemini enabled the creation of 3D models from archival photographs, animating camera paths to allow virtual tours of these historical studios. In another creative segment by Nourry and Lorca, AI editing is employed to gradually make female students disappear from an archival image of Antoine Bourdelle’s studio, poignantly illustrating how these women have been erased from history.
The ‘Visionaries’ exhibition is available for viewing at the Petit Palais from October 20, 2026, to January 30, 2027. The accompanying film is also displayed in the museum galleries, with a behind-the-scenes trailer available online through Google Arts & Culture.
For more stories about pioneering women who have influenced global culture, explore additional Google Arts & Culture projects such as Surfacing Women in Smithsonian History, the Road to Equality, Women in India: Unheard Stories, and the Artemisia Gentileschi retrospective.