The International Sculpture Center is proud to present the winners of the 2009 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. This year’s program attracted a record number of nominees from university sculpture programs in North America and abroad.
The Great Equalizer: James Florschutz
For three decades, James Florschutz has been a gatherer, primarily collecting organic debris from the woods near his Vermont home. The last couple of years have found him tossing detritus culled from more urban areas into the trunk of his car as well.
The Topography of Being: A Conversation with Merav Ezer
Merav Ezer is an Israeli artist living and working in New York. Her multi-disciplinary work references the relationship between identity and environment, both natural and created, using a mixture of styles, voices, and media. Ezer describes the dialectic that informs her practice as “inspired by the personal conflict of possessing a nomadic inclination while also
Human Nature: A Conversation with Michele Oka Doner
Oceanic myths and images inform Michele Oka Doner’s grand public art projects and sculptural forms. She has embedded miles of terrazzo floors at Miami International Airport’s North Terminal with bronze shells, pearls, starfish, and other sea-life forms and has created terrazzo floors with botanical and scientific motifs for other institutions.
Celebrating “Misfits”: A Conversation with Silvia B.
Dutch artist Silvia B. creates striking figures that cross the boundaries of gender, species, and age. Beyond their high-fashion gloss, however, her hybrid beings aim to question constructions of beauty and value. Silvia B. has had various solo exhibitions in the Netherlands, at venues such as 5-MM, the Five Minute Museum in Eindhoven (2009), and
Scaling Public Space: Janet Echelman
How might we begin to count the ways to be public? How do we categorize the different experiences and encounters of the dynamic connections between individual subjectivity and transitory collectivity that characterize the shifting dimensions of the public realm?
Tongue-in-Cheek Eloquence: Dan Webb
At a 2006 solo exhibition at Howard House, Seattle artist Dan Webb displayed a carved wooden balloon in the form of a heart. I Love You solidly captures the buoyancy of a helium balloon while hinting at its brief life expectancy: like people, balloons and their sentiments expire.
Forum: The New Acropolis Museum
If architecture can be seen as sculpture writ large, the New Acropolis Museum in Athens qualifies as a fine example of the form. Housing works so splendid that they echo with meaning millennia after their making, a building of such singing grace, that calls attention to its contents rather than itself, is like a gift
Private Voice, Public Benefit: Lois Teicher
Lois Teicher’s Curved Form with Rectangle and Space (2000) is just what its title describes, a gently bowed piece of sheet steel rising 14 feet from the ground, painted pure white, with a tall, narrow rectangular space cut out of it just to the right of center.
Evidence of Being: A Conversation with Richard Humann
While Williamsburg can claim no movement as its own, the inventive sculpture of Richard Humann reveals what made the hip Brooklyn neighborhood a creative escape from art world institutionalization and commercialization in the 1990s. Although Williamsburg has recently succumbed to development pressures, driving out mid-level artists at crucial stages in their careers, Humann retains his
