Gallery 333, 333 Old Main Rd., N. Falmouth, MA, Arlene Hecht, owner and director.
Georgette Benisty





Georgette Benisty was born and raised in Casablanca and she has spent many years living and working in the United States. Named for the French fabric Georgette, with its sturdy and diaphanous qualities, the artist, as a child, would playfully enter an imaginative fantasy world envisioning the gowns with which she would begin her career in fashion. Eventually she successfully marketed her own line through Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills and in her own atelier on Newbury Street in Boston. After thirty-five years, Georgette closed her successful wedding gown business to follow her heart. She began stitching together broken cloth fragments as she undertook a vivid exploration: drawing from the colors, rhythms, architecture, and antiques of her native land. Painting and doll making has become her main focus. Her exquisitely crafted dolls reveal refined sophisticated fabric collage interweaving her past and present. A workshop at the Cleveland Museum of Art was held in April 2009 by Georgette Benisty on doll making techniques employing the techniques of fashion sewing embellished by texturing painting and embroidering. Ms, Benisty’s unique textiles and paintings are now being exhibited in fine art galleries.

My work reflects the influences of French culture and my native North Africa. I attempt to interweave the past and present by employing stitching, collage and painting to reconstitute the integrity of worn material. In my figures, the absence of features and emphasis on dress suggests the hiding and revealing of life experience.

Always, I work out of a diasporal drive for connection and through my finished forms, gather disparate remnants into relationships imbued with belonging.


View another artist's page: