Recreating the lost studios of women sculptors with Prune Nourry

Recreating lost sculptor studios with Google AI

Recreating the lost studios of women sculptors with Prune Nourry

Oct 21, 2026

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We partnered with artist Prune Nourry on a documentary film that uses Google AI to recreate the workspaces of 19th-century sculptors, bringing their legacies back into focus.

Prune Nourry

Artist

Amit Sood

VP, Google Arts & Culture

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Artist Prune Nourry and Google Arts & Culture are honoring 18 overlooked female sculptors in the new "Visionaries" exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris. The project uses generative artificial intelligence to recreate the artists' lost studios and highlight how women were historically erased from the art world. You can visit the exhibition from October 20, 2026, through January 30, 2027, or watch the accompanying documentary online.

Summaries were generated by Google AI. Generative AI is experimental.

• "Recreating the lost studios of women sculptors" celebrates forgotten female artists in Paris.

• Artist Prune Nourry honors 18 historical sculptors with new monumental plaster portraits.

• Researchers used archival letters and photos to uncover these women's hidden creative lives.

• Google’s AI brings these lost studios to life through immersive 3D models.

• Visit the "Visionaries" exhibition in Paris to see these women’s stories restored.

History often forgot the talented women who worked as sculptors in Paris long ago. Artist Prune Nourry is now using AI to recreate their lost studios and bring their stories back to life. These digital models let you walk through their workspaces and see how they lived. It’s a cool way to show how these women were unfairly left out of history books.

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Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, talented female sculptors lived and worked across Paris. Despite social constraints and limited access to artistic training, these pioneers made their mark in a predominantly male art world. Yet for a long time, women appeared in art history primarily as models or muses, while their roles as active artists were pushed into the background.

On October 20, a new exhibition titled "Visionaries" opens at the Petit Palais in Paris, coinciding with Art Basel Paris. The exhibition presents monumental plaster portraits sculpted by Prune Nourry, celebrating 18 historical female sculptors and their creative legacies.

To expand on their lives, Prune and Google Arts & Culture collaborated with film director Vincent Lorca on a 10-minute documentary. The project builds on a year of research during which three art historians gathered letters, journals, and photographic portraits of women sculptors who lived and worked in Paris. Because few historical photos of their actual workspaces exist, Lynn Cherny, creative technologist-in-residence at the Google Arts & Culture Lab used Google’s generative AI and image editing models to bring to life the studios of sculptors like Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Jane Poupelet, and Camille Claudel.

Using a custom tool built with Google Gemini, the team created 3D models from archival photos to animate camera paths, allowing viewers to move virtually through the historical studios.

In another sequence conceived by Prune and Lorca, AI image editing is used to make the female students slowly fade from an archival photograph of Antoine Bourdelle’s studio, leaving only the men. The effect visually demonstrates how these talented women vanished from history.

"Visionaries" runs at the Petit Palais from October 20, 2026, through January 30, 2027, alongside the film installation in the museum galleries and a behind-the-scenes trailer online on Google Arts & Culture .

To discover more stories of trailblazing women who have shaped global culture, explore more Google Arts & Culture initiatives, such as Surfacing Women in Smithsonian History with the Smithsonian, Road to Equality , Women in India: Unheard Stories , and the Artemisia Gentileschi retrospective .

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