In 1970, Caland moved to Paris in search of an avant-garde arts community, leaving her husband and children in Lebanon. Once in Paris, Caland struggled to find acceptance in the art world; Brigitte is quoted as noting that the cultural establishment felt “she wasn’t an artist or painter because all she did was erotic work—which wasn’t true, but this was the perception.” Around this time, Caland also began designing kaftans, adorning them with symbols that celebrated the body. In 1987, following the death of her then-partner, the sculptor George Apostu, Caland left Paris for Venice, California. There, with the help of her friend
Ed Moses, Caland bought property from the California abstractionist
Sam Francis, who was on his deathbed at the time.
The Venice house, which Caland gives a tour of in
this video from 2009, became a gathering place for artists on the west side of Los Angeles. Despite her booming social life in the arts community and her following in Lebanon, Caland’s work didn’t receive major attention in the U.S. until recently. Caland was in the 2016 edition of the
Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” biennial, where her work was widely celebrated. Some considered this a catalyst in her career. In 2017, she was in the Venice Biennale, followed by a 2018 show at the
Institute of Arab and Islamic Art in New York, and finally the Tate St. Ives retrospective from earlier this year. In an
Artforum review of the 2018 show, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
wrote: “Perhaps most importantly, the careful selection here, spanning more than fifty years, emphasizes the formal clarity of Caland’s erotic line—her ability to be sexually suggestive, almost comically naughty, while at the same time penning a feminist political critique of beauty, the body, and expectations of a woman’s place.”