The 25 Sculptures That Define the Modern Age

Sculpture occupies an odd place in contemporary art. Because of their sheer physical presence, sculptures are often harder to show, not to mention more difficult to sell: This fact forces the medium into a secondary role behind painting, especially in a business so obsessed with the markets. And yet, sculpture is arguably the art that the public, throughout history, has tended to interact with the most, even if we’re not always paying it much attention. Sculpture is an indelible part of the global landscape. It’s in our public plazas, our corporate office parks. Celebrated (and often meticulously preserved) as a form of creative expression across the world, sculpture goes back to the prehistoric age, to early peoples’ use of stone flints to carve anthropomorphic figures out of mammoth ivory. Every culture since has made its own totems, sometimes to mark its triumphs and tragedies, and sometimes for reasons that are less clear.

To choose the 25 most important works of sculpture made since 1945, we asked a panel of experts to gather at the New York Times building in March. They included the artists Firelei Báez, 45; Charles Gaines, 82; Adam Pendleton, 42; and Arlene Shechet, 77 — each of whom has, to varying degrees, explored and advanced sculpture in their work — along with Ruba Katrib, 44, the chief curator of MoMA PS1 in Queens and the former curator of the nearby SculptureCenter, the only museum in New York explicitly dedicated to the medium. Any task that ends in anointing something “the most important” is highly subjective and should be considered with a heavy dose of skepticism; a different group would have come up with different selections, and it’s easy to imagine the following list turning out differently had this same group met at a different time on the same day.

But while this was an exercise with disagreement baked into its premise, as moderator I was surprised at our sheer level of divergence about what makes a sculpture significant. I was likewise (pleasantly) surprised at our ability to make compromises and concessions. Each member of the jury submitted a list of proposed inclusions before our meeting, and each had to let go of a favorite: Báez lost the battle to include Simone Leigh’s 2022 installation at the U.S. pavilion of the Venice Biennale, Katrib a passionate argument for Niki de Saint Phalle. I was disappointed at how quickly Michael Heizer’s 1969 land art masterpiece “Double Negative” was dismissed by the group. (Fans of Alberto Giacometti, John Chamberlain, Joseph Cornell, Barbara Hepworth and Elizabeth Catlett will also surely notice their absences here.) There was a good deal of back-and-forth about which Kara Walker sculpture to include; we eventually had to put the matter to a vote that never felt quite resolved. Our most heated debate revolved around Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial (1982) in Washington, D.C., and whether such a work — a monument, commissioned by the U.S. government — should be considered sculpture at all. (No, we finally decided; the most important monuments should be a different list altogether, but we also had to put Lin to a vote, and then to a follow-up vote.)

Beyond that, our definition of sculpture was generally broad. We would consider works from any country, though our choices display a clearly Western (and New York-centric) bias. We would weigh not just individual three-dimensional objects but group exhibitions and works skirting the line of other media, up to and including those centered on the human body as it moves through space. In fact, one of the few things the panel seemed to agree on implicitly is that a sculpture can be anything interacting with its environment, whether that’s an enormous steel structure by Richard Serra or, in the case of the Pope.L, a video of a performance, filmed over nine years, in which the artist periodically crawled along Broadway in New York City until he’d finally completed the entire 22-mile journey.

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