Artist Donna Isham + Mark Isham, Oscar-Nominated Composer Bring Multi-Sensory Exhibition to Philly

Los Angeles–based artist Donna Isham will debut her work in Philadelphia with Alchemy: The Sound of Color at Morton Contemporary, opening Saturday, June 6 from 6 - 8pm - free and open to the public and will be up through to July 31.

The exhibition is a collaboration with her husband, acclaimed composer Mark Isham—an Emmy and Grammy Award–winning musician and Academy Award–nominated film composer—whose work spans film scores such as Crash and A River Runs Through It.

Together, they’ve developed a unique immersive practice that blends large-scale painting with projection-mapped animation and original musical compositions, creating environments that exist somewhere between contemporary art, film, and performance. The work invites viewers to slow down, sit with the paintings, and experience them through sound and light as well as image—something that feels especially relevant at a moment when most visual engagement happens through screens.

What makes this particularly compelling for a feature is the collaboration itself: Donna’s background in painting and visual storytelling meets Mark’s decades-long career in music and film scoring, resulting in a rare dialogue between disciplines. Their process—bridging painting (which traditionally exists outside of time) with music (which unfolds within it)—is both conceptually rich and visually striking.