Arlene Shechet is a sculptor known for her effortless combination of disparate elements, precarious and provisional arrangements, and boundary-collapsing visual paradoxes. With gravity-defying work that seems to tilt, contort, bend, and melt, Shechet’s sculptures appear to be set in motion while still, unearthing the expressive potential of material and forms and forcing us to sit with—and move around—its contradictions. Highly technical and yet entirely intuitive, her work embraces improvisation and seeks to examine the humor and pathos of being alive and in a body. Shechet has changed the landscape of ceramics since she began working with clay in 2007. Embracing the inherent duality in clay—its malleability and ability to hold still, its fragility and hardened strength—Shechet has led a resurgence of ceramic work in contemporary art through her experiments with glazes, hybrid forms, and pedestals by embracing risk, rejecting binaries, and leaning into—and driving dialogue between—the underlying tensions of not only form and material, but life itself.
Shechet has been the subject of many solo exhibitions, including All at Once (2015), a major, critically acclaimed survey of her work at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston that the New York Times called, “some of the most imaginative American sculpture of the past 20 years, and some of the most radically personal,” and Full Steam Ahead (2018), an ambitious, large-scale public project installed in Madison Square Park in New York. Her curatorial vision has been shown in the exhibitions Porcelain, No Simple Matter at The Frick Collection (2016-2017), From Here On Now at The Phillips Collection (2016), Making Knowing at The Drawing Center (2021), STUFF at Pace Gallery NY (2022), and Disrupt the View at the Harvard Art Museums (2022-25), which is currently on view. Shechet’s approach to installation and curation is intuitive and playful, responding to the architecture of space and creating dialogue between works, sites, and spectators, inviting them into a space and ushering them through its choreography.
In 2023, Shechet was elected as a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This follows 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. 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. She currently lives and works in New York City and The Hudson Valley.
Museum Collections
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas Austin, Austin, TX
Boca Raton Museum of Art, FL
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR
Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.
ICA/Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN
Minnesota Museum of American Art, Saint Paul, MN
Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL
National Academy Museum and School, New York NY
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS
New York Public Library, Print Collection, New York, NY
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ
RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA
Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA
Tumurun Museum, Surakarta, Indonesia
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA
Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK
Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ