Judith Shea

Last updated
Judith Shea, Without Words (1988), Minneapolis Sculpture Garden Without Words 1988.jpg
Judith Shea, Without Words (1988), Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

Judith Shea is an American sculptor and artist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1948. She received a degree in fashion design at Parsons School of Design in 1969 and a BFA in 1975. This dual education formed the basis for her figure based works. Her career has three distinct phases: The use of cloth and clothing forms from 1974 to 1981; Hollow cast metal clothing-figure forms from 1982 until 1991; and carved full-figure statues made of wood, cloth, clay, foam and hair beginning in 1990 to present.

Contents

About

Her first New York City presentation was at Alanna Heiss's CLOCKTOWER galleries Project Room in April 1976. In a performance based on color theory, she made a full spectrum of sheer silk shirts and pants. Dancer Juliette Shen, changing clothes at Shea's direction, added and subtracted layers, mixing new colors live in the transparent silk. There were five performances over three days. In the January 1981 Whitney Biennial, Shea showed three simple forms hung on the wall that evoked iconic clothes of her childhood years; a black overcoat, "I LIKE IKE", and 2 simple sheath dresses, "INAUGURAL BALL" and "EXEC. SEC'Y.". Five related works were included in the Hirshhorn’s Directions 83 survey. To Shea these works evoke a human presence through the clothes.

With the support of NEA grants in 1984 and 1986, Shea began casting her figures into iron and bronze, allowing her to work more three dimensionally. The 1986 fellowship also offered a French Exchange, and Shea went to Paris to study the statuary of its parks and gardens. This research led to several hollow-figure compositions from the 1980s designed to be sited in public spaces, such as Eden 1986 (John Hancock Tower, Chicago), Shepherd’s Muse 1988 (Oliver Ranch), Shield 1990 (Sheldon Museum of Art), Without Words 1988 (Walker Art Center), and "Post-Balzac" 1990 (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden).

In 1989 after a residency at Chesterwood—Daniel Chester French’s summer studio in Stockbridge, Mass. where he had worked on his Lincoln Memorial monument—Shea began to carve what she termed ironic monuments and statues in wood. A show of these works at Max Protetch Gallery, NY in March 1993 was titled "All About Adam, and Eve". In an article in Art in America Magazine that Spring, author Brooks Adams referred to them as "Shea's Anti-Monuments". Included was a white northern pine equestrian statue of an over-sized, middle aged, white-stained male astride an undersized, over-worked white-stained farm horse. Signifying the end of the cultural tradition of who gets to be the hero in our celebratory monuments, Shea titled the work "No More Monument".

Following this in 1994 The Public Art Fund sponsored Shea's installation, The Other Monument. This wooden equestrian monument was of a free black man astride a black horse. It was sited at Doris Freedman Plaza at 60th St. and Central Park, directly north of the Civil War era Union Victory Monument of Augustus Saint-Gaudens - a gilded equestrian figure of General William Tecumseh Sherman. Two years previously Shea had been awarded the Saint Gaudens Fellowship. Influenced by her research into his Civil War works, Shea realized that at that time there were no figurative monuments to the other victory of the American Civil War - Emancipation. This was her offering of the missing monument.

Post-Balzac (1991) by Judith Shea at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden Post-balzac.JPG
Post-Balzac (1991) by Judith Shea at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden

Following several fellowships abroad, including a Rockefeller Foundation Residency Bellagio, Italy, The Rome Prize Fellowship the American Academy in Rome, and the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Artist’s Award Residency in Oaxaca, Mexico, Shea began a group of works in 2000 that deal with the figure imagined as character and icon. [1] This work set the stage for the evolution of her next major body of work, which she titled Judith Shea: Legacy Collection. The topic of the Legacy Collection was the artist’s first hand experience of 9/11: She lives very near what became Ground Zero of the World Trade Center site. In this very personal response, Shea fashioned a group of mannequin-like figures, as if placed in the windows of the Brooks Brothers store just across from the site on that Tuesday. They are looking skyward, elegant in gray felt, covered in dust and debris. About them Shea has written, "I was struck by this unique juxtaposition, the sleek image of Success - American Style, opposite this spectacular attempt to topple it, with just the unbroken shop window between themz'. Several works from the Legacy Collection series have been acquired by the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven.

In 2012, Shea curated an exhibition at the invitation of The National Academy Museum. From their Collection she chose portraits and self-portraits of female members of the Academy from 1858 to 1971. In a video tour of the exhibit, titled "Her Own Style: An Artist's Eye With Judith Shea", Shea interpreted what she saw as the very personal self description that each woman made in her self-portrait. Telling what mattered to her as an artist and how she wanted to be viewed in history. Shea made additional sculptural portraits for the show of three of her favorite figurative sculptors - "Louise Monument" (Bourgeois), "Elizabeth Tribute" (Catlett) and "Marisol".

Awards

Collections

Shea's work is included in the following public collections:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden</span> Art museum in Washington, D.C., U.S.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft and is part of the Smithsonian Institution. It was conceived as the United States' museum of contemporary and modern art and currently focuses its collection-building and exhibition-planning mainly on the post–World War II period, with particular emphasis on art made during the last 50 years.

Yuriko Yamaguchi is a Japanese-born American contemporary sculptor and printmaker. Using more natural mediums, she creates abstract designs that are used to reflect deeper symbolistic ideas. She currently resides near Washington, D.C..

Lawrence "Larry" Zox was an American painter and printmaker who is classified as an Abstract expressionist, Color Field painter and a Lyrical Abstractionist, although he did not readily use those categories for his work.

Mary Frank is an English visual artist who works as a sculptor, painter, printmaker, draftswoman, and illustrator.

Susanna J. Coffey is an American artist and educator. She is the F. H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in New York City. She was elected a member the National Academy of Design in 1999.

Judy Pfaff is an American artist known mainly for installation art and sculptures, though she also produces paintings and prints. Pfaff has received numerous awards for her work, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004 and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts. Major exhibitions of her work have been held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Denver Art Museum and Saint Louis Art Museum. In 2013 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Video interviews can be found on Art 21, Miles McEnery Gallery, MoMa, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and other sources.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Gitlin</span>

Michael Gitlin is a contemporary sculptor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alyson Shotz</span> American sculptor

Alyson Shotz is an American sculptor based in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for experiential, large-scale abstract sculptures and installations inspired by nature and scientific concepts, which manipulate light, shadow, space and gravity in order to investigate and complicate perception. Writers suggest her work challenges tenets of monumental, minimalist sculpture—traditionally welded, solid, heavy and static—through its accumulation of common materials in constructions that are often flexible, translucent, reflective, seemingly weightless, and responsive to changing conditions and basic forces. Sculpture critic Lilly Wei wrote, "In Shotz’s realizations, the definition of sculpture becomes increasingly expansive—each project, often in series, testing another proposition, another possibility, another permutation, while ignoring conventional boundaries."

Job is a bronze sculpture, created by American artist Judith Shea. It is located on the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) campus in Indianapolis, Indiana. The piece was created in 2005 and placed on loan at Herron School of Art and Design for the school's first Public Sculpture Invitational, held between May 2005 and August 2006. In 2008, Herron acquired Job, with financial support from Jane Fortune, Dr. Robert Hesse, William Fortune Jr., and Joseph Blakley.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Dugmore</span> American painter

Edward Dugmore was an abstract expressionist painter with close ties to both the San Francisco and New York art worlds in the post-war era following World War II. Since 1950 he had more than two dozen solo exhibitions of his paintings in galleries across the United States. His paintings have been seen in hundreds of group exhibitions over the years.

Petah Coyne is a contemporary American sculptor and photographer best known for her large and small scale hanging sculptures and floor installations. Working in innovative and disparate materials, her media has ranged from the organic to the ephemeral, from incorporating dead fish, mud, sticks, hay, hair, black sand, specially-formulated and patented wax, satin ribbons, silk flowers, to more recently, velvet, taxidermy, and cast wax statuary. Coyne's sculptures and photographs have been the subject of more than 30 solo museum exhibitions.

Lester Johnson was an American artist and educator. Johnson was a member of the Second Generation of the New York School during the late 1950s. The subject of much of his work is the human figure. His style is considered by critics and art historians to be in the figurative expressionist mode.

Michael Loew was an American Abstract Expressionist artist who was born in New York City.

Judith E. Stein is a Philadelphia-based art historian and curator, whose academic career has focused on the postwar New York art world. She has written a biography of the art dealer Richard Bellamy, as well as feature articles regarding artists including Jo Baer, Red Grooms, Lester Johnson, Alfred Leslie and Jay Milder.

Peter Grippe was an American sculptor, printmaker, and painter. As a sculptor, he worked in bronze, terracotta, wire, plaster, and found objects. His "Monument to Hiroshima" series (1963) used found objects cast in bronze sculptures to evoke the chaotic humanity of the Japanese city after its incineration by atomic bomb. Other Grippe Surrealist sculptural works address less warlike themes, including that of city life. However, his expertise extended beyond sculpture to ink drawings, watercolor painting, and printmaking (intaglio). He joined and later directed Atelier 17, the intaglio studio founded in London and moved to New York at the beginning of World War II by its founder, Stanley William Hayter. Today, Grippe's 21 Etchings and Poems, a part of the permanent collection at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, is available as part of the museum's virtual collection.

Nancy Grossman is an American artist. Grossman is best known for her wood and leather sculptures of heads.

Cynthia Carlson is an American visual artist, living and working in New York.

Judith Barry is an American artist, writer, and educator best known for her installation and performance art and critical essays, but also known for her works in drawing and photography. She is a professor and the director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. She has exhibited internationally and received a number of awards.

Miranda Lichtenstein is an American artist focusing on photography and video.

Ann Pibal is an American painter who makes geometric compositions using acrylic paint on aluminum panel. The geometric intensity is one of the key characteristics that defines her paintings.

References

  1. Friedman, Martin (March 2005). "Judith Shea: Seven Characters on the Verge of a Revelation". Sculpture. 24 (2): 28–33.