Virtural Clay: Arlene Shechet, March 8, 2017 @ 4:00pm

Arlene Shechet is a sculptor living and working in New York City and the Hudson Valley.
All at Once, a major, critically-acclaimed 20-year survey of Shechet’s work was on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2015. In a review of the exhibition, Sebastian Smee of The Boston Globe wrote: “It’s in the harmonies and tensions between these colors and textures, between suggestions of both order and anarchy, decay and blooming freshness, that these works cough, sputter, and sing. If they really are the great analogs to interior life that I feel them to be, it’s because Shechet knows that this life, expertly attended to, has its own folds and wrinkles, its own hollows and protuberances; that it is at once fugitive and monumental … and ultimately unknowable.” All at Once was also hailed by The New York Times as “some of the most imaginative American sculpture of the past 20 years, and some of the most radically personal.”
In recent years, Shechet’s work has included historical museum installations. Porcelain, No Simple Matter: Arlene Shechet and the Arnhold Collection, on view at The Frick Collection from May 2016 to April 2017, is described in the New Yorker as “a balancing act of respectful and radical” with “whimsical beauty and deep smarts.” From Here on Now, Shechet’s upcoming solo museum exhibition opens at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. in October 2016.
Shechet was featured in season 7 of PBS’s Art 21 in 2014 as well as season 4 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Artists Project in 2016. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2016 CAA Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work, a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship Award in 2004, the Anonymous Was a Woman Artist Award and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2010, as well as several New York Foundation for the Arts awards.
Shechet’s work is in many distinguished public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the National Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, and the CCS Bard Hessel Museum.
This event is part of 92Ys Virtual Clay™ series: offering first of a kind, real-time online classes that gather a vibrant community of artists, designers and art historians to speak with you about important topics in ceramics. The conversations are meant to challenge preconceptions and explore new territory, inspiring you to think about the world in fresh and different ways.
Free with admission.