Past and Future Collide in Arlene Shechet’s Otherworldly Sculptures

It’s a picturesque June day, and Arlene Shechet is showing me around her studio in Kingston, about two hours north of New York City. “Here’s our little family of chainsaws,” she says. It’s a delightfully unexpected place to start the tour, fitting for an artist whose recombinant objects of ceramic, wood, and metal have earned her a reputation as one of our most innovative living sculptors.

The capabilities of the 5,000-square-foot space are impressively varied. There’s just about every tool you can think of, plus a metal shop, a custom wood-drying kiln, a computer- and paper-modeling zone, shelves stacked with bins of clay, and a serene courtyard surrounded by concrete walls. “My own little LA in Kingston,” she jokes of the latter.

Shechet, 75, has had a studio in Kingston for 10 years, four of them in this particular space. It’s where she makes the big stuff. She still keeps a studio in Woodstock, where she’s lived for more than two decades. But she (or rather, her work) had outgrown it. “It’s up a dirt road, very hard to move sculpture, which I thought was the right idea to keep me under control,” she says, breaking into a sly grin. “But I lost control.”

A good thing, in this case. Shechet’s 2024 show “Girl Group” at Storm King, which brought six soaring sculptures to the grounds of the Hudson Valley art park, was lauded as a triumph. (One assessment in (opens in a new window) The New York Review: “As a collagist and an amalgamator, as a colorist, as a shape generator, and as a no-nonsense feminist heroine, Shechet has few equals.”) It was her first time making outdoor sculptures at such heroic scale, but for Shechet—at that point best-known for having elevated ceramic work into the arena of fine art—it seemed like a natural extension of a practice that has always been rooted in boundary-pushing exploration.

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