Sylvia Stone

Last updated • 3 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Sylvia Stone
Photo of Sylvia Stone.jpg
Photo of Sylvia Stone
Born1928 (1928)
Died2011 (2012)
NationalityCanadian
Known forSculpture
Movement Abstract expressionism, Constructivism
Spouse Al Held

Sylvia Stone (1928 – September 5, 2011) [1] was a Canadian sculptor. [2] Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art [2] and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. [3] She was a tenured professor at Brooklyn College and a notable Abstract artist at the New York School. She is best known for her large-scale sculptures made from Plexiglass.

Contents

Early life

Stone was born in 1928 in Toronto, Ontario. [3] She had two older sisters. When she was two years old, Stone, her siblings, and her mother left Stone's father. Her mother was unable to support her children on her own. Stone was subsequently sent to Children's Aid homes while her sisters were sent to help on local farms. At the age of six, Stone was placed back with her mother and sisters. The Great Depression severely impacted the family, and they were forced to move several times. It was during this time that Stone began to draw. [4]

Stone was a gifted student and attended Central Tech, an arts high school in Toronto. During this period, she lived alone, as her sisters married and her mother moved out west. Her mother sent her rent money during this time, and after school Stone worked at Woolworth's. At the age of sixteen, Stone began supporting herself, working full-time on the night shift at a war plant, so that she could attend school during the day. [4]

Art career

Stone's husband, Al Held, in front of a Hard-edge painting at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1966. Hard Edge in Stedelijk Museum van Amerikaanse schilder Al Held, Bestanddeelnr 918-9590.jpg
Stone's husband, Al Held, in front of a Hard-edge painting at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1966.

In 1946, at the age of seventeen, Stone moved to New York. [4] She briefly attended the Art Students League and worked as a photographer in a nightclub before marrying a man, whom she would later divorce. Stone had her first child at the age of twenty two, but continued to attend art classes part-time, to the disapproval of her husband's family. [4] While at the Art Students League, she studied under Harry Sternberg, Morris Kantor, and Vaclav Vytlacil. [4] She primarily painted in the 1950s, describing her work as moving from figurative and abstract landscapes to Hard-Edge paintings. In 1959, she first met painter Al Held, beginning a years long professional and romantic relationship. [5] They were married in 1969. As the Abstract art movement developed in New York, she began experimenting with combining painting and sculpture, creating large Plexiglass sculptures and shaped paintings. [6] Her work began to be recognized and shown more frequently, and she shared two studio spaces with Held, in Manhattan and Boiceville, New York. [7] [4] Her work is considered both Constructivist and Minimalist. [8] [9] [10] It was also inspired by Cubism and Bahaus. [4]

In 1969, Stone, along with artists such as Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, and Claes Oldenburg, starred in the first Fashion Show Poetry Event, a series conceived of by poets Hannah Weiner, John Perreault, and Eduardo Costa and associated with the St. Mark's Poetry Project. [11] Despite not having a graduate degree herself, Stone taught undergraduate and graduate art courses at Brooklyn College for several years. [12] [13] She began by substituting a small number of Ad Reinhardt's courses, before becoming an assistant and then full professor in the 1970s. [4] Her image was included in the iconic 1972 poster Some Living American Women Artists by Mary Beth Edelson. [14] In 1975, Stone was included in the exhibit "Two Hundred Years of American Sculpture" at the Whitney Museum. [4] Her work was shown by Andre Emmerich in the late 1970s and early 1980s. [7] [4]

Stone and Held divorced in 1986. [5] Stone passed away from an illness on September 5, 2011. [12]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elaine de Kooning</span> American expressionist painter (1918–1988)

Elaine Marie Catherine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period and was an editorial associate for Art News magazine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Nevelson</span> American sculptor (1899–1988)

Louise Nevelson was an American sculptor known for her monumental, monochromatic, wooden wall pieces and outdoor sculptures. Born in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, she emigrated with her family to the United States in the early 20th century. Nevelson learned English at school, as she spoke Yiddish at home.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lee Bontecou</span> American sculptor and printmaker (1931–2022)

Lee Bontecou was an American sculptor and printmaker and a pioneer figure in the New York art world. She kept her work consistently in a recognizable style, and received broad recognition in the 1960s. Bontecou made abstract sculptures in the 1960s and 1970s and created vacuum-formed plastic fish, plants, and flower forms in the 1970s. Rich, organic shapes and powerful energy appear in her drawings, prints, and sculptures. Her work has been shown and collected in many major museums in the United States and in Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vija Celmins</span> Latvian-American visual artist

Vija Celmins is a Latvian American visual artist best known for photo-realistic paintings and drawings of natural environments and phenomena such as the ocean, spider webs, star fields, and rocks. Her earlier work included pop sculptures and monochromatic representational paintings. Based in New York City, she has been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions since 1965, and major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Baber</span> American abstract expressionist painter (1928 - 1982)

Alice Baber was an American abstract expressionist painter who worked in oil and watercolor. She was educated in the United States and in the 1950s and 1960s she studied and lived in Paris. She also traveled around the world. Baber, a feminist, organized exhibits of women artists' work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethel Schwabacher</span> American painter

Ethel Kremer Schwabacher was an influential abstract expressionist painter, represented by the Betty Parsons Gallery in the 1950s and 1960s. She was a protégé and first biographer of Arshile Gorky, and friends with many of the prominent painters of New York at that time, including Willem de Kooning, Richard Pousette-Dart, Kenzo Okada, and José Guerrero. She was also the author of a monograph on the artist John Charles Ford and a memoir, "Hungry for Light".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Audrey Flack</span> American artist (born 1931)

Audrey Flack is an American artist. Her work pioneered the art genre of photorealism and encompasses painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alma Thomas</span> American painter (1891–1978)

Alma Woodsey Thomas was an African-American artist and teacher who lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and is now recognized as a major American painter of the 20th century. Thomas is best known for the "exuberant", colorful, abstract paintings that she created after her retirement from a 35-year career teaching art at Washington's Shaw Junior High School.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Betty Parsons</span> American artist, art dealer, and collector

Betty Parsons was an American artist, art dealer, and collector known for her early promotion of Abstract Expressionism. She is regarded as one of the most influential and dynamic figures of the American avant-garde.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">I. Rice Pereira</span> American abstract artist, poet and philosopher (1902–1971)

Irene Rice Pereira was an American abstract artist, poet and philosopher who played a major role in the development of modernism in the United States. She is known for her work in the genres of geometric abstraction, abstract expressionism and lyrical abstraction, as well as her use of the principles of the Bauhaus school. Her paintings and writings were significantly influenced by the complex intellectual currents of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jo Baer</span> American minimalist artist (born 1929)

Josephine Gail Baer is an American painter associated with minimalist art. She began exhibiting her work at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and other venues for contemporary art in the mid-1960s. In the mid-1970s, she turned away from non-objective painting. Since then, Baer has fused images, symbols, words, and phrases in a non-narrative manner, a mode of expression she once termed "radical figuration." She lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Ryan</span> American painter

Anne Ryan (1889–1954) was an American Abstract Expressionist artist associated with the New York School. Her first contact with the New York City avant-garde came in 1941 when she joined the Atelier 17, a famous printmaking workshop that the British artist Stanley William Hayter had established in Paris in the 1930s and then brought to New York when France fell to the Nazis. The great turning point in Ryan's development occurred after the war, in 1948. She was 57 years old when she saw the collages of Kurt Schwitters at the Rose Fried Gallery, in New York City, in 1948. She right away dedicated herself to this newly discovered medium. Since Anne Ryan was a poet, according to Deborah Solomon, in Kurt Schwitters’s collages “she recognized the visual equivalent of her sonnets – discrete images packed together in an extremely compressed space.” When six years later Ryan died, her work in this medium numbered over 400 pieces.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Janet Fish</span> American painter

Janet Fish is a contemporary American realist artist. Through oil painting, lithography, and screenprinting, she explores the interaction of light with everyday objects in the still life genre. Many of her paintings include elements of transparency, reflected light, and multiple overlapping patterns depicted in bold, high color values. She has been credited with revitalizing the still life genre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Perle Fine</span> American Abstract expressionist painter (1905–1988)

Perle Fine (1905–1988) was an American Abstract expressionist painter. Fine's work was most known by its combination of fluid and brushy rendering of the materials and the use of biomorphic forms encased and intertwined with irregular geometric shapes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suzy Frelinghuysen</span> American painter and soprano

Suzy Frelinghuysen, also known as Suzy Morris, was an American abstract painter and opera singer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grace Hartigan</span> American painter

Grace Hartigan was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and a significant member of the vibrant New York School of the 1950s and 1960s. Her circle of friends, who frequently inspired one another in their artistic endeavors, included Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Frank O'Hara. Her paintings are held by numerous major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. As director of the Maryland Institute College of Art's Hoffberger School of Painting, she influenced numerous young artists.

Cecilia Roser, who works under the name Ce Roser, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1925. Roser has been active in New York City as an artist since the 1960s. Ever since childhood, Roser had been painting and drawing. While studying in Berlin, Roser learned of a female artist named Käthe Kollwitz. Kollwitz, who worked until the day she died, was an inspiration to Roser. Remarking that she would like to live that way too, Roser proceeded to emphasize the need for young artists, especially women, to find a fitting predecessor and mentor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Luise Clayborn Kaish</span> American artist (1925–2013)

Luise Clayborn Kaish was an American artist known for her work in sculpture, painting, and collage. Throughout her career, Kaish's work was exhibited and collected by major museums, including the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Jewish Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kaish created monumental sculptures in bronze, aluminum, and stainless steel, which remain on view in educational, religious, and commercial settings across the United States and internationally.

Mary Weatherford is a Los Angeles–based painter. She is known for her large paintings incorporating neon lighting tubes. Her work is featured in museums and galleries including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and the High Museum of Art. Weatherford's solo exhibitions include Mary Weatherford: From the Mountain to the Sea at Claremont McKenna College, I've Seen Gray Whales Go By at Gagosian West, and Like The Land Loves the Sea at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work has been part of group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roland Reiss</span> American artist

Roland Reiss was an American artist known for his miniature tableaux and paintings.

References

  1. 1 2 "Sylvia Stone". www.whitney.org.
  2. 1 2 "Sylvia Stone". Smithsonian American Art Museum.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Munro, Eleanor C. (1979). Originals: American women artists. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. ISBN   978-0-671-23109-5.
  4. 1 2 "Al Held Foundation". alheldfoundation.org. Retrieved 2019-05-01.
  5. Colpitt, Frances (1991). "The Shape of Painting in the 1960s". Art Journal. 50 (1): 52–56. doi:10.2307/777086. ISSN   0004-3249.
  6. 1 2 "Making a Making: Jonathan Rajewski in Conversation with Bill Dilworth". Three Fold Press. Retrieved November 27, 2023.
  7. Foster, Hal (1981-01-10). "Sylvia Stone". Artforum. Retrieved 2023-11-28.
  8. "Press Release: Different Shapes". Eric Firestone Gallery. Retrieved November 27, 2023.
  9. Kramer, Hilton (1977-04-29). "Art: 'Less Is More,' A Minimal Touch". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-11-28.
  10. Picard, L. (1969, January 24). Art. The East Village Other , 4(8), 15–21.
  11. 1 2 "SYLVIA STONE Obituary (2011) - New York, NY - New York Times". Legacy.com. Retrieved 2023-11-28.
  12. Kriel, Margot (1980). "Review of Originals: American Women Artists; Art Talk: Conversations with 12 Women Artists". Woman's Art Journal. 1 (1): 60–63. doi:10.2307/1358021. ISSN   0270-7993.
  13. "Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Retrieved 21 January 2022.