Exhibition of around 35 works from the collection of Delores Browne Abelson, honoring the New York gallery October Art and its support of Native American artists from the Southwest.
October Art is showing at the Heard Museum in downtown Phoenix through November 1, 2026. It's an exhibition that honors Delores Browne Abelson (1935-2023), a ballerina, educator, and arts advocate who spent her life moving between the dance world and the art world. In 1984, she founded the New York gallery October Art Ltd., which opened alongside the Whitney Museum of American Art and spent ten years championing Native American artists from the Southwest. The gallery eventually closed, but its name lived on in the collection she continued to build.
Before she was running a gallery, Browne was a dancer. She started ballet at the Judimar School of Dance in Philadelphia in 1949 and joined the New York Negro Ballet in the late 1950s, where she performed principal roles and toured internationally. When she stepped away from the stage, she became a teacher and an advocate for Black and Native American artists, and that commitment is what eventually led her to open the gallery. The exhibition gathers around 35 works from her collection, and it doesn't stop at the art itself: you'll see painting alongside ephemera from her archive, like letters, photographs, and pamphlets that give a sense of how she worked.
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One of the most personal parts of the show is the work by Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu/Portuguese/Native Hawaiian, 1946-2006), who was a close friend of Browne's. His pieces sit alongside the rest of the collection, and seeing them together helps connect the gallery's public face to the personal relationships that drove it. The show runs through November 1 at the Heard Museum in downtown Phoenix.
