A large chess board with life-size pieces is posing questions about gender roles and hierarchy

Like a lot of great art, the sculptor Donna Dodson’s latest work was born of childhood trauma.

Growing up in the Midwest, Dodson would play chess with her older brother on a beautiful, hand-carved onyx chess set gifted to them by their grandparents — the siblings engaging in long, heated battles, again and again.

And again and again, Dodson would inevitably fall short.

“The humiliation of always losing created kind of a fire in me,” the 58-year-old, Massachusetts-based artist joked recently in a phone interview. “I think me making this chess set is somehow reclaiming my agency and dignity,” she said, referring to her art Match of the Matriarchs, which is a 24-by-24-foot chess set.

The set, which appears in an exhibition of the same name at the Museum for Art in Wood, has the artist turning her attention to one of the world’s oldest games, examining — through the lens of chess — power, matriarchy, and the role of women in society.

The exhibition is centered on a life-size, 32-piece chess set — all the pieces are women and range from roughly four feet to six feet in height. Dodson handcrafted them from salvaged wood.

The pieces sit atop a massive board that will involve some kind of interactive element — the details of which are still being finalized before the show opens in November.

Including what is believed to be the world’s only life-size chess set featuring all women pieces, the show aims to “transform the traditionally hierarchical game into a speculative arena of matriarchal power and ecological symbolism,” according to the museum’s program notes.

“By placing the feminine at the forefront of a game so deeply associated with power, conflict, and hierarchy, Dodson asks us to reconsider its origins — and to wonder what may have been lost as the game evolved over time,” said Jennifer-Navva Milliken, executive director and chief curator at the Museum for Art in Wood.

A second, smaller chess set — on a board roughly 12 feet by 12 feet — will be fully interactive, with visitors encouraged to stage their own matches, moving the pieces as their strategies demand.

“By playing a game, or inviting viewers to come in and rearrange [the] art work, it creates a new art work every time,” Dodson said.

In addition to Dodson’s work, the show will include about nine other artistic chess sets — including one designed by famed Pennsylvania artist Wharton Esherick, as well as a micro-set with pieces that can only be moved using tweezers.

Prior to its debut at the Museum for Art in Wood, Dodson’s piece was on display at the Boston Sculptors Gallery and, most recently, at the World Chess Hall of Fame in St. Louis — though the Philadelphia version will include expanded programming.

Dodson was never the artsy kid in school, she says. She attended Wellesley College in New England with plans of becoming a doctor, even working as a candy striper for a time. Her medical ambitions dwindled as she began to take to art in her mid-20s, along with her childhood love for chess.

It wasn’t until she met Joseph Wheelwright, the noted Boston sculptor who would go on to become her mentor and teach her woodworking, that she returned to the game.

Wheelwright, who died in 2016, would ask her to play during lunch breaks, and though he, too, would “clobber” Dodson — even while handicapping himself by taking several of his pieces off the board — the matches no doubt served as inspiration for Match of the Matriarch, she said.

In Philadelphia, Dodson has found a fitting setting for her exhibit.

The city is home to Jennifer Shahade, an author and three-time national chess champion, whose artwork will also be featured in the exhibit.

“She has created a number of conceptual works and videos that recontextualize chess and chess sets as art,” Dodson said.

The exhibition also coincides with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s presentation from Marcel Duchamp — an artist famously infatuated with the game of chess who also occasionally incorporated the game into his work.

The Museum for Art in Wood exhibit comes on the heels, meanwhile, of a worldwide resurgence in the game spurred by both the pandemic and the 2020 release of the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, which starred Anya Taylor-Joy and drove a wave of new interest in chess, particularly among girls and women.

Dodson partakes in some form of chess daily, playing a weekly game in Maynard, Mass., where she now lives, as well as online.

“I’ve become much more knowledgeable about the current chess community, what’s going on in the chess world, and have met some of the real-life champions in chess, which is all super exciting,” she said.

Dodson, who will be present Nov. 7 for an artist talk at the museum, said she hopes the game’s universal charm will make the exhibit accessible to a wide audience.

“I think a lot of people don’t feel comfortable going into art museums — they don’t feel that they know enough [about art] or whatever,” she said. “So I think the whole chess theme is very accessible — there’s a whole worldwide chess community of people who play for fun, play as a hobby, their kids play, their grandfather plays.”

“Donna Dodson: Match of the Matriarchs” runs Nov. 6 through March 21, 2027, at Museum for Art in Wood, 141 N. 3rd St., Philadelphia. museumforartinwood.org