Artist Talk: Arlene Shechet

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Join us for an intimate conversation with sculptor Arlene Shechet, whose vanguard practice has developed over decades of consistently experimental, insistently rigorous, and wildly inventive work. Shechet, along with Hirshhorn curator Anne Reeve, will celebrate the installation of her sculpture Maiden May (2023) on the Hirshhorn Plaza and discuss the work’s origins and evolution. Created for the landmark 2024 exhibition Girl Group at Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York—Shechet’s largest exhibition of outdoor sculpture to date—the work offers avenues to engage the artist’s ceramics practice as well as her concurrent expansion into large-scale metalwork. On the Hirshhorn’s outdoor campus, it will further testify to Shechet’s longstanding concerns with art history and gender, her astute humor, and her commitment to the medium of sculpture, then and now.
 
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Arlene Shechet is a sculptor known for her effortless combination of disparate elements and boundary-collapsing visual paradoxes. Gravity-defying works that seems to tilt, contort, bend, and melt, her sculptures appear to be in motion while remaining still. Highly technical and yet entirely intuitive, her work embraces improvisation and examines the humor and pathos of being alive and in a body. Shechet has changed the landscape of ceramics since she began working with clay in 2007. Embracing the medium’s inherent duality—its malleability and ability to hold still; its fragility and hardened strength—she has led a resurgence of ceramic work in contemporary art through her experiments with glazes, hybrid forms, and pedestals. Her works embrace risk, reject binaries, and lean into—and drive dialogue between—the underlying tensions of not only form and material, but also life itself.

In 2023, Shechet was elected as a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This followed many other awards and honors, including the CAA Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work, the Guggenheim Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 2024, a monumental sculpture from her much-lauded exhibition Girl Group was acquired by Storm King Art Center for its permanent collection. Shechet’s work is in more than 50 other public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, National Gallery of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Nasher Sculpture Center, Walker Art Center, and Whitney Museum of American Art.
 
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Image: Courtesy of Arlene Shechet and Storm King Art Center, photograph by Matt Borkowski.