The New York Times Style Magazine

“The T List”

By Laura Bannister
April 27, 2024

This May, Storm King Art Center — the Hudson Valley, N.Y., sculpture park that hosts works by artists from Louise Bourgeois to Sol LeWitt, as well as a stream of couples on third or fourth dates — will debut a new commission by the New York artist Arlene Shechet. “Girl Group” centers on six huge, swooping sculptures, all between 10 and 20 feet tall, some as wide as 30 feet. (Smaller, complementary pieces in steel, ceramic and wood will be displayed indoors.) While the larger works began as ceramics, Shechet says she employed the material as “a seed ... to generate something that I didn’t know.” She riffed digitally on the ceramic shapes, then hand-built models using cardboard and paper. Later, she reproduced those physical experiments as digital drawings, shuttling her developing forms between on- and offline mediums for years. The result, a

combination of digital speculation and physical inventiveness, is the collection of two- tone steel-and-aluminum sculptures set into Storm King’s grassy landscape.

“The idea of Girl Group is that each sculpture functions alone — as a solo — and as a member of an ensemble,” Shechet says. While her mighty, swirling structures are spread out widely, they’re never completely isolated: Viewers will always experience more than one simultaneously, glimpsing parts of another nearby. Shechet sees “Girl Group” as a perpetual exchange, an alert and beckoning chorus. “They have gesture, sass and color,” she says of her works. “Seems like a girl group to me.” “Girl Group” will be on view at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, N.Y., from May 4 through Nov. 10. stormking.org.