Arlene Shechet

With gravity-defying work that seems to tilt, contort, bend, and melt, Shechet’s sculptures appear to be set in motion while unearthing the expressive potential of material and forms and forcing us to sit with—and move around—its contradictions. Highly technical yet entirely intuitive, her work embraces improvisation and seeks to examine the humor and pathos of the lived human experience. Recognized by the CAA with the Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work (2016), Shechet has changed the landscape of ceramics since she began working with clay in 2007. Embracing the inherent duality of clay—its malleability and durability, its fragility and hardened strength—Shechet has led a resurgence of ceramic work in contemporary art through her experiments with glazes, hybrid forms, and pedestals by embracing risk, rejecting binaries, and leaning into—and driving dialogue between—the underlying tensions of not only form and material, but life itself. Shechet has been the subject of many solo exhibitions, including All At Once —a major, critically acclaimed survey of her work at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2015) that The New York Times called “some of the most imaginative American sculpture of the past 20 years, and some of the most radically personal”—and Full Steam Ahead (2018)—an ambitious, large-scale public project installed in Madison Square Park, New York (2018). Her curatorial vision has been shown most recently in Porcelain, No Simple Matter, The Frick Collection, New York (2016); From Here On Now, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2016); and Making Knowing, The Drawing Center, New York (2021); and STUFF, Pace Gallery, New York (2022). Her most ambitious outdoor exhibition to date, Arlene Shechet: Girl Group , debuted earlier this year at Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York. The exhibition features six new large-scale commissions—spanning heights of ten to twenty feet and lengths of up to thirty feet—along with complementary indoor works in wood, steel, and ceramic. Also currently on view is Disrupt the View: Arlene Shechet at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2022–2025). Like her work, Shechet’s approach to installation and curation is equally intuitive and playful, responding to the architecture and creating dialogue between works, sites, and spectators, inviting them into a space and ushering them through its choreography. In 2023, Shechet was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This follows many other awards and honors including the Artist Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1987); the Visual Artist Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York (2004); and the Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York (2010), and the CAA Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work, National Academy Induction, College Art Association (2016), among others. Shechet’s work is held in over fifty public collections worldwide, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among other institutions. The artist currently lives and works in New York City and The Hudson Valley.