Arlene Shechet creates improvisatory ceramic sculptures that effortlessly combine a range of materials, provisional arrangements, and visual paradoxes. Her intuitive and innovative work in ceramics has changed the nature of sculpture through her experiments with glazes, hybrid forms, and unconventional pedestals. Employing an experimental approach to ceramic sculpture, she tests the limits of gravity, color, and texture by pushing against the boundary of classical techniques, sometimes fusing her kiln-fired creations with complex plinths formed of wood, steel, and concrete. Shechet’s sculptures exist between the raw and the refined, humor and pathos, and figuration and abstraction. Her works shift, bend, contort, and melt with expressive movement and pop with dynamic colors, merging the traditions of decorative arts with contemporary, risk-taking sculpture. Her work playfully but knowingly investigates the history of sculptural production, highlighting the humor and pathos of the human condition.
Arlene Shechet was born in 1951 in New York, and lives and works in New York and the Hudson Valley. Shechet received a BA from New York University, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1978).
She has been the subject of many solo exhibitions, including All at Once, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Full Steam Ahead, Madison Square Park, New York; Phillips Collection; RISD Museum; Weatherspoon Art Museum; Anderson Gallery, Richmond; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art; International Ceramic Biennial; Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; Tang Museum; ICA Philadelphia; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; Henry Art Gallery; and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Group exhibitions include Porcelain, No Simple Matter, The Frick Collection; From Here On Now, The Phillips Collection; Making Knowing, the Drawing Center; STUFF, Pace Gallery NY; and Disrupt the View, Harvard Art Museums.
Shechet’s work is in over fifty public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Centre Pompidou, National Gallery of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Nasher Sculpture Center, Walker Art Center, and Whitney Museum of American Art.
In 2023, Shechet was elected as a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has received many other awards and honors including the CAA Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
- 1951
Selected Solo and Two Person Exhibitions
- 2024
- 2023
- 2022
- 2022-2025
- 2021
- 2021-2023
- 2020
- 2019
- 2018-2019
- 2018
- 2017
- 2016
- 2015
- 2014
- 2013
- 2012
- 2011
- 2010
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- 2001
- 2000
- 1999
- 1998
- 1997
- 1996
- 1995
Selected Group Exhibitions
- 2023
- 2022-2023
- 2022
- 2021
- 2020
- 2019-2020
- 2019
- 2018-2019
- 2018
- 2017
- 2016
- 2015
- 2014
- 2013
- 2011
- 2010
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- 2007
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- 1999
- 1998
Group Exhibition Catalogues and Books
- 2022
- 2020
- 2018
- 2017
- 2016
- 2015
- 2014
- 2010
- 2009
- 2007
Bibliography
- 2024
- 2023
- 2022
- 2021
- 2020
- 2019
- 2018
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- 2015
- 2014
- 2013
- 2012
- 2011
- 2010
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- 2005
- 2004
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- 2002
- 2001
- 2000
- 1999
- 1998
Awards, Grants and Fellowships
- 2023
- 2021
- 2016
- 2011
- 2010
- 2006
- 2004
- 1999
- 1996
- 1993
- 1986
Public Collections