In May, A.i.A. visited Shechet on site at Storm King as she prepared for her show to open. She talked about approaching her work with a sense of humor and sassiness, and accepting the fact that mystery is always part of her process.

Video credits include:

Directed, Produced and Edited by Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography Alan Lee Jensen
Second Cam Op Joseph Kickbush
Sound Nil Tiberi
Arlene Shechet Fabrication photos by David Schulz
Interviewer: Emily Watlington

In May, A.i.A. visited Shechet on site at Storm King as she prepared for her show to open. She talked about approaching her work with a sense of humor and sassiness, and accepting the fact that mystery is always part of her process.

Video credits include:

Directed, Produced and Edited by Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography Alan Lee Jensen
Second Cam Op Joseph Kickbush
Sound Nil Tiberi
Arlene Shechet Fabrication photos by David Schulz
Interviewer: Emily Watlington

There has, however, been one thing missing: color. Walk around the grounds and you’ll see sculptures in many materials—wood, stone, bronze, plenty of Corten steel—but hardly anything painted. If there’s paint, it’s bound to be bright red, the most aggressive possible choice against so much green. Where are all the other colors? Arlene Shechet asked herself this question when she was commissioned to make an exhibition for Storm King, where, as she said in her studio in January, “there are so many works I love, which I’ve learned from, and works I don’t love, which I’ve also learned from.”

The result, unveiled just this May, is a suite of six monumental sculptures called “Girl Group.” The title announces, in no uncertain terms, the arrival of a feminist sensibility in a historically male-dominated site. Though made of steel and aluminum, the works unfurl like fabric in a stiff wind. One sculpture, titled Maiden May, is executed in emerald greens and raw aluminum. Another, As April, has lemon yellow as its dominant tone, with accents in chartreuse. A third, Midnight, stretches billboard-size across a hilltop, a lavish composition in orange and rosy pink. It’s a palette more often encountered on the fashion runway, or in Mannerist painting, than in modern sculpture.

These knockout works are only the latest, if possibly the greatest, evidence of Shechet’s insatiable curiosity. She has a way of continually noticing her own blind spots—and those of the prevailing art world—and illuminating the unseen possibilities they hold. Though well known for mixed-media sculptures that assert themselves powerfully in space, never before has she worked at the scale of “Girl Group.” To achieve it, Shechet collaborated with five specialized fabricators near her studio in Upstate New York, the collaborations requiring a leap of faith. She is always looking to solve new problems: “To be an artist,” she says, “means to be alive with learning.”

THIS KIND OF CURIOSITY has rendered Shechet’s career anything but predictable. She was born in 1951, in Forest Hills, a leafy middle-class enclave in the Queens borough of New York City. Her father was an accountant, her mother, a former librarian and an artist in her own right—a frustrated one. She had studied at Hunter College and maintained a studio in the basement of their family home, but was discouraged from pursuing a career by the gender norms of the time. Nevertheless, she exposed her daughter to art at a young age. They made drawings together, and took regular trips to the Museum of Modern Art. On one occasion, Shechet stood in awe before Robert Motherwell’s 11-foot-wide painting Elegy to the Spanish Republic (1965–67) as her mother wondered what her child might be seeing in that gigantic, Rorschach-like abstraction.

The answer, it turned out, was the future. “That experience turned me on to the possibility that you could exist on a level that’s not concrete,” she told the magazine Upstate Diary in 2017. “More ethereal, more unexplainable, more mysterious, stranger worlds which were far from the bourgeois world I was brought up in.” As a teenager in the 1960s, she considered a career in political activism—such a thing seemed possible in those days—after bouncing from one college campus to another: Skidmore, Sarah Lawrence, a semester in Paris, Stanford, and then NYU. Finally, at RISD, she committed to being an artist, this being the one profession that could contain her boundless curiosity, and allow her to continue exploring multiple lines of inquiry.

After graduating in 1978, Shechet stayed on to teach at RISD; seven years later, she took up a position at the Parsons School of Design. Meanwhile, she met and married Mark Epstein, a man of gentle wisdom who is a prominent writer on the interconnected subjects of Buddhist meditation and psychoanalysis. They have two children, Will (a successful musician) and Sonia (a curator at the Museum of the Moving Image). Up until 1995, when she left Parsons, Shechet had to balance studio time with teaching and child-rearing. She was constantly making work but had little opportunity to show it.

Her first breakout moment came when she was in her 40s: a series of plaster Buddhas, modest in scale but potent in affect, with surfaces expressively embellished with skins of paint, somewhat reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg’s early Pop still lifes. In lieu of conventional plinths, she would set them on furniture she found on the street, “the Western, funky version of the lotus the Buddha sits upon.” In parallel, she was making vessel forms and square mandalas. Their blue-and-white palette referenced blueprints, and they could pass for Chinese porcelain or Dutch delftware from 50 feet away, though they were actually cast in pigmented abaca paper, a process she developed at Dieu Donné Papermill in Brooklyn.

In the ’90s, Shechet’s work clearly reflected the intellectual and spiritual interests she shared with her husband. (The title of his 1998 book, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart, could be an apt description of her artistic practice, both then and since.) These weren’t, however, interests shared by the art world at the time. Commodity-based conceptualism—alternately bone-chilling and extravagantly self-regarding—was the order of the day: think of Cady Noland, Rosemarie Trockel, and Jason Rhoades, whose versions of sculpture made frequent use of found objects. In this environment, Shechet’s commitment to craftsmanship and her otherworldly iconography could not have been less in step. (About the only positive feedback she got, at first, was from fellow artist Kiki Smith, who liked how unfashionable the work was.) With the passage of time, this early work of Shechet’s has come to seem increasingly prescient as other spiritual women artists, like Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton, have finally gotten their due.

SHECHET’S INTEREST IN Buddhism may seem surprising to those who know her. Prolific, social, and hyper-verbal, she hardly comes across as a stereotypical Zen personality. But as anyone who has looked into the matter will know, Buddhist teachings are entirely compatible with explosive, ambitious creativity. The true path need be neither straight nor narrow. “What I really came to understand was that the radically non-judgmental Buddhist idea was an essential insight for how to behave in the studio,” Shechet told the Brooklyn Rail in 2015. “I just don’t fall into a place where I’m so comfortable that I start making what I already know too well.”

It was only in the aughts, when she began working in clay, that Shechet fully realized the possibilities of this principle of “non-attachment.” She had encountered ceramics in art school, but felt no attraction to it, partly because, at the time, she saw the department at RISD as mired in its own parochial issues. She had, however, explored the typology of the vessel form in her cast paper works, recognizing its metaphorical connection to both life and death—“the domestic equivalent of the stupa, the sacred space,” as she says.

Shechet began thinking too about how we use vessels to sustain ourselves, and ultimately place our remains in them. These latent associations came to the fore after she, horrifyingly, witnessed the first plane slam into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. She happened to be walking across the Brooklyn Bridge just as it took place. In the months that followed, living in Tribeca, she felt as if she were inhabiting a crematorium. Her ultimate response was a powerful work called Building, shown at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle in 2003; it comprised numerous cast porcelain vessels with smudged, ashy surfaces. “I invented an idea of painting into the plaster molds with grey and black glazes and stains,” Shechet explained, “and then the porcelain was cast in those molds over and over until they turned white.” The works hauntingly capture presence and disappearance in a kind of anti-monument to the events of 9/11.

This initial foray into clay was done in collaboration with the ceramics program at the University of Washington, led by Japanese American artist Akio Takamori; the forms in Building were wheel-thrown by the students. It was only in 2006 that Shechet began working sculpturally with the medium on her own: ever exploring, she found this generative technique fairly late in her career. In art world terms, though, she was once again an early adopter. Despite the achievements of such figures as Lucio Fontana and Peter Voulkos, whom she greatly admires, clay was still widely devalued. “Very little had been explored,” she has said. “I could look at it almost as if no one had thought about it before.”

Shechet began teaching herself to build complex forms by hand, and investigating the vast alchemy of ceramic glazing. A solo exhibition at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, in 2007, served as the coming-out party for this new body of work—and, in retrospect, a whole new era in American ceramic sculpture. As Roberta Smith noted in a review for the New York Times, Shechet’s works seemed all but “debt-free” in their relationship to previous sculpture: “sexy, devout, ugly and beautiful all at the same time.” She might have added “alien,” for they came across as previously unknown life-forms, bladders with distended limbs and tentacular appendages. They seemed to reach out, to breathe in, to quietly digest. Some had cloudlike forms atop them, like cartoon thought bubbles. The sensitively modeled surfaces, sheathed in black and gold glazes, enhanced the impression of emergent sentience.

It was immediately clear that Shechet was on to something big. Her new body of work helped inspire—and played a starring role in—the genre-shifting 2009 exhibition “Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay,” curated by Jenelle Porter and Ingrid Schaffner at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. (I served as an external adviser for the project; Porter would later curate Shechet’s first museum retrospective, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.) At the same time, Shechet was expanding her productive capacity. She and Mark bought a place in Woodstock, a modernist building, unusual in that neck of the woods, designed by architect James Mayer in 1964. Shechet established a studio there, and also set about transforming the surrounding landscape: wild thyme and moss instead of lawn, a green roof atop the house.

These new arrangements had a decisive impact on Shechet’s work. She now had the space to create (and fire) larger ceramic elements, and neighborhood access to chunks of raw timber, which became a key part of her vocabulary. These days, she also operates an even larger studio in nearby Kingston, shuttling back and forth between the two. This literal division of labor might drive some artists to distraction, but she finds it helpful. It allows her a constantly refreshed, un-precious, and “non-attached” view of her own practice.

Generative discontinuity does seem to be the one given for Shechet—it is, quite literally, her working method. She always has multiple sculptures going at once, and often cannibalizes her own work, incorporating remnants from past compositions in a perpetual chain of association. In some works, like All in All (2016), she stacks up components cast from one another in different materials. Normally, her scale approximates that of the human body, lending the works an anthropomorphic effect, and encouraging what Shechet calls a “body to body” relationship. Her titles, which are fantastic, often emphasize the idea of sculpture as a verb: Ripple and Ruffle (2020), Deep Dive (2020), Day In Day Out (2020), With Wet (2022), Teasing and Squeezing (2022).

Shechet’s forms, meanwhile, tend toward the totemic, with purposeful confusions between the sculpture proper and the base that holds it off the floor. Metal, wood, and ceramic elements, usually in a combination of raw and brightly colored surface treatments, are choreographed into elegantly disjunctive arrangements, as if they’d slip-slided into felicitous alignment. The sculptures feel fast, fresh. Given that she is dealing with such recalcitrant materials, it takes a huge effort to keep them that way.

SHECHET’S WORK HARD/PLAY HARD AESTHETIC is also evident in her curatorial work, which began in the 2010s as a sideline, but has grown into a major aspect of her practice. As with her plinths, it can be hard to say just where her curating stops, and her art starts. It began with a two-year residency (from 2012–14) at Meissen, the fabled porcelain manufactory near Dresden. Here, in the 18th century, an alchemist finally cracked the porcelain code, and Europeans at last had direct access to the coveted material, previously imported from China at fabulous expense. Granted access to the Meissen archive—including its impressive repository of casting molds—Shechet plunged in and eventually emerged with a whole new artistic vocabulary, in which the manufactory’s refined, traditional wares seemed caught in flagrante delicto, a veritable orgy of figurines and functional forms in slapstick, sometimes mutually penetrating, positions. She made molds of molds, slip-casted plaster in porcelain, and manipulated their. conventions even as she studied them rigorously.

This hilarious virtuosic body of work has taken on a life of its own over the past decade, partly because decorative art curators have seen in it an opportunity to reanimate their dormant collections. In a series of exhibitions at the RISD Museum, the Frick Collection, and most recently, the Harvard Art Museums, Shechet has playfully installed her associative configurations alongside historic porcelains, making antiques seem strange and new again. Shechet has also curated other artists’ work—notably in “From Here On Now” at the Phillips Collection (2016–17), “Ways of Seeing” at the Drawing Center (2021–22), and “STUFF at Pace Gallery” (2022)—but her most significant acts of arrangement are of her own sculpture.

In 2018 Shechet made another jump in her career and expanded her reputation as an artist’s artist when she joined the gallery giant Pace. “My artists have always talked about her,” Pace CEO Marc Glimcher told ARTnews at the time. “Hers are the kind of shows where artists come back with their minds expanded.” Since then, she has been getting more and more opportunities to place her work where it will be encountered by what she calls “random humanity.” Here again, the friction of chance encounters proves generative. For her project at Madison Square Park in New York, Full Steam Ahead (2018–19), she emptied a central fountain, turning it into a sort of playground for art works and visitors alike. Nearby, a sculpture in carved wood called Forward lounged on a short flight of steps, like a Henry Moore having a cigarette break. When kids climbed up on to its lap, it somehow seemed complete.

The Storm King setting is much less chaotic. In order to encourage a restful interactivity suited to the site, Shechet provided custom seating of her own design. This gracious gesture recognizes visitors as people out for a relaxing day, rather than hardened souls on an art pilgrimage. But to be sure, the real invitation comes from “Girl Group”itself. Shechet describes the six sculptures as “grappling energy,” which accurately captures the way they inhabit space. The scale and materiality are different from her previous sculpture, but her trademark thrilling, vertiginous instability remains. Above all, this is an installation to enjoy—to post on Instagram, yes, but more important, to travel around, under, and around again, in a landscape now punctuated with joyful, sophisticated colors.

True to her conviction that the most important part of making art is what you learn from it, the making of “Girl Group”has involved just this sort of active search, an iterative back-and-forth of digital and analog techniques: on-screen renderings and paper studies, technical drawings, and industrial-scale metalwork. Linear elements, threading through and whipping round the volumes, feel drawn in midair. All told, Shechet has had ample opportunity to be inside the work, in both mind and body. At a certain point she was at one of her fabricators’ shops, surrounded by the sublime complexity of what she herself had created. “I know every inch of these things,” she thought to herself, “and yet I felt like I didn’t know anything. The sculptures were so large they had become unfamiliar to me.” In Shechet’s view, that was a mark of success. For how could she, or anyone else, learn something from sculpture, if it were not more than meets the eye?  

Shechet in her studio in 2013.

©RUTHIE ABEL

Arlene Shechet, the sculptor known for her ceramic works that involve experiments with chance and elements of Zen Buddhist thinking, will now be represented by Pace Gallery, which has spaces in New York, London, Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, Geneva, and Palo Alto, California. She was previously represented in New York by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., and is currently also represented in Chicago by Corbett vs. Dempsey and in Los Angeles by Susan Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

“My artists have always talked about her, whether it’s Adam Pendleton or Tara Donovan or Thomas Nozkowski,” Marc Glimcher, Pace Gallery’s president and CEO, told ARTnews. “They love her work. Hers are the kind of shows where [our artists] say, ‘If you don’t see the Arlene Shechet show, you’re not my friend anymore!’ They’re the kind of shows where artists come back with their minds expanded. What’s more important than that? Nothing.”

Shechet has in recent years established herself as one of the most important artists working with in ceramics. Her beguiling works, which were the subject of a major survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2015, often appeared to have shattered or morphed during their firing. Meissen ceramics, Zen Buddhism, and Post-Minimalism have all served as reference points in her work, which calls attention to the way objects are presented in institutions, how knowledge is passed between cultures, and how sculptures get made.

“I like evidence of how the thing is made,” Shechet told ARTnews in 2015. “I find that that actually makes something even more mysterious. To know more, strangely, adds mystery. I don’t even want to deconstruct that.”

Pace will have its first show with Shechet in Chelsea in 2019. Before then, however, Shechet has a few projects on the horizon. This April, she will have a solo show at Almine Rech in Paris and organize a Judy Linn exhibition at the Cue Art Foundation in New York. In September, she will unveil a new outdoor sculpture made partly of porcelain in New York’s Madison Square Park.

COURTESY CAA AWARDS

Yesterday, the College Art Association (CAA) announced the 2016 winners of its CAA Awards, which are given annually to artists, art historians, critics, and conservators for their contributions to their fields. Among this year’s winners are Arlene Shechet, who had a critically acclaimed ICA Boston show in 2015, and Carmen Herrera, who, at age 100, is currently preparing a Whitney retrospective for the fall. Also noteworthy are Chika Okeke-Agulu, who is being honored for her book Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria, and Rosalind Krauss, who is receiving a lifetime achievement award for her criticism.

The full list of winners follows below.

• Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
  Krista Thompson
  Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice
  Duke University Press
• Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
  Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann
  New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1919–1933
  Los Angeles County Museum of Art and DelMonico Books
• Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions
  Myroslava M. Mudrak and Tetiana Rudenko
  Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s
  Ukrainian Museum
• Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
  Matthew C. Hunter
  “Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Nice Chymistry’: Action and Accident in the 1770s”
  The Art Bulletin, March 2015
• Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism
  Chika Okeke-Agulu
  Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria
  Duke University Press
• Art Journal Award
  Abigail Satinsky
  “Movement Building for Beginners”
  Art Journal, Fall 2015
• Distinguished Feminist Award
  Carrie Mae Weems
• Distinguished Teaching of Art Award
  Sabina Ott
• Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award
  Patricia Berger
• Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work
  Arlene Shechet
• Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
  Carmen Herrera
• CAA/American Institute for Conservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
  Debra Hess Norris
• Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
  Rosalind E. Krauss
• Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award Finalist
  Jens M. Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin, eds., Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World, J. Paul Getty Museum
• Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions Finalist
  Timothy Verdon and Daniel M. Zolli, eds., Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral, Museum of Biblical Art, in association with D. Giles
• Morey and Barr Award Finalists
  • Paul Binski, Gothic Wonder: Art, Artifice, and the Decorated Style, 1290–1350, Yale University Press, for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
  • Elina Gertsman, Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna, Pennsylvania State University Press
  • Adam Herring, Art and Vision in the Inca Empire: Andeans and Europeans at Cajamarca, Cambridge University Press

Mary Reid Kelley, The Thong of Dionysus (still), 2015.

COURTESY FREDERICKS & FREISER, NEW YORK

MONDAY, OCTOBER 12

Opening: Walid Raad at the Museum of Modern Art
This exhibition marks Walid Raad’s first major American survey and will present the Lebanese artist’s photography, video, sculpture, and performance works—the latter of which is extremely important, along with narrative and storytelling, in Raad’s work—from the last 25 years. Special focus will be given to Raad’s two long-term projects, The Atlas Group (1989–2004) and Scratching on things I could disavow (2007–present).
MoMA, 11 West 53rd Street, 10:30— 5:30 p.m.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15

Opening: Mary Reid Kelley at Fredericks & Freiser
Mary Reid Kelley’s black-and-white, bizarro femmes return this week with her video The Thong of Dionysus, the capper to the upstate New York–based artist’s “Minotaur” trilogy. Here, Reid Kelley returns to—and shakes up—Greek mythology by focusing on stories about Ariadne, Bacchus, the Maenads, and Priapus. Using wordplay, off-kilter make-up, and history, Reid Kelley remixes an ancient tale about love and death. Alongside her new video will be 18 photographs—portraits of people, from Euripides to Lil’ Kim, who Reid Kelley finds to be “Dionysian” in some way or another.
Fredericks & Freiser, 536 West 24th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Andrea Mary Marshall, The Feminist Calendar, 2016.

COURTESY GARIS & HAHN

Opening: Andrea Mary Marshall at Garis & Hahn
Andrea Mary Marshall is both photographer, subject, and object in her Pirelli-style limited-edition calendar, The Feminist Calendar 2016. The calendar’s 24 photos will be on view in large format—12 are sexually explicit shots, while the other dozen are modest and fully clothed. A press release explains, “Side one of Marshall’s double­-sided calendar embraces sex, power, and consumerism, while side two strips away the superficial adornments of traditional female beauty in favor of a more raw, barefaced femininity.” Coincidentally, Pirelli announced this month that Annie Leibovitz has been commissioned to shoot 12 women selected for more than just their physical qualities for their 2016 calendar. So that’s something.
Garis & Hahn, 263 Bowery, 6—8 p.m.

Talk: Arlene Shechet at the Brooklyn Museum
Hot off her first solo museum survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, New York–based sculptor Arlene Shechet will do a talk this week at the Brooklyn Museum with Catherine Morris, a curator for the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center. Shechet has become known for her ceramic works, which are often abstract, ambiguous, and frustrating. Unclassifiable and difficult, Shechet’s sculptures take what is thought by many to be a simple process and make it mysterious, adding on references to the history of sculpture and ceramics as she does so. Then again, as she said earlier this year in an interview for this magazine, “To know more, strangely, adds mystery.”
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 7 p.m., $16

Jordan Casteel, Ashamole Brothers, 2015.

COURTESY SARGENT’S DAUGHTERS

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16

Opening: Jordan Casteel at Sargent’s Daughters
Jordan Casteel’s second show at the gallery, titled “Brothers,” will feature eight oil paintings created during her artist residency at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s “Process Space” on Governor’s Island. Once again, her subjects are black men—but this time, the focus is their relationships with one other in their own homes, inspired by those of Casteel’s twin brother, nephew, and friends. Aiming for nuanced, rather than politicized, portraits of black men, Casteel’s paintings “[confront] us with the humanity and individuality of these men and [we] are brought into their worlds on their own terms,” according to a release.
Sargent’s Daughters, 179 East Broadway, 6—8 p.m.

Opening: Jared Madere at the Whitney Museum of American Art
New York–based artist Jared Madere may be better known for running than the gallery Bed-Stuy Love Affair than making art, but that will change after this installation at the Whitney, Madere’s first solo show in America. Designed for the museum’s first-floor gallery, Madere’s installation will involve objects like salt, flowers, and burned coats—materials which may seem familiar, if not too familiar. By using objects that have already been worn down or obviously used, Madere is able to show us the ways that we are inherently connected to the things we own, and how we always leave our mark on our possessions. Madere’s installation is free and open to the public.
Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, 10:30 a.m.–10 p.m.

Screening: Eric Leiser at The New School
The New School’s Kinescope series will be screening the experimental films of filmmaker, animator, puppeteer, writer, holographer, and CalArts grad Eric Leiser, as curated by Kinescope founder Pawel Wieszczecinski. Leiser will introduce each of his films, which often deal with themes of dream symbology, the sublime in nature and tragedy, stop-motion animated psychodrama, funerary parlors, spiritual mystical Christian tone poems, Czech Surrealism, and magical realism, and will participate in a subsequent Q&A session with Wieszczecinski.
The New School, Kellen Auditorium, 66 Fifth Avenue, 7—9 p.m. RSVP via Facebook. 

McArthur Binion, DNA: Study: 84 x 84 inches: 1, 2015, oil paint stick and paper on board.

COURTESY GALERIE LELONG

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 17
Talk: McArthur Binion with Lauren Haynes at Galerie Lelong
At first glance, McArthur Binion’s crosshatched abstract paintings seem as impersonal as possible, especially since they refer to Minimalism with their drab colors and emphasis on grids. Read up on Binion’s work, however, and you come to realize that underneath these paintings are copies of items that are wildly personal to the Chicago-based artist—birth certificates, identification cards, his portrait, among other things. For Binion, abstraction, a style that was once seen as having little to do with personal histories, is borne out of the artist’s past, and he’ll be discussing that in relation to his new show, “Re:Mine,” in a walkthrough with Lauren Haynes, an associate curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Galerie Lelong, 528 West 26th Street, 12 p.m.

Opening: Svenja Deininger at Marianne Boesky 
Much like memory, Svenja Deininger is a consummate revisionist. For her second solo show at the gallery, “Untitled/Head,” the Viennese painter continues to build and dig deep into her own abstractions, using primer, color, varnish to uncover bare canvas, ever in flux. Higher dimensions involved—the architecture of the canvas, the physicality of the space it inhabits, the viewers themselves—are indirectly proportional to the explicit perimeters of her flat canvases. As a press release states of this unique time-space continuum, “Her resulting intimate abstractions have consistently shown the intensity that a painting can have within a larger space, its edges providing the only index for how it was made and its atmosphere created.”
Marianne Boesky Gallery, 509 West 24th Street, 10 a.m.—6 p.m.

Arlene Shechet, Once Removed, 1998, Abacá paper and Hydrocal, dimensions variable.

JOHN BERENS/COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST/COLLECTION OF ANDRA AND JOHN EHRENKRANZ/INSTALLED: SHOSHANA WAYNE GALLERY, SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA, 1998

Casting techniques have long proved generative for the artist, from her paper vessels of the mid-1990s to Building (2003), an abstract cityscape of porcelain vases made in the wake of September 11. In an immersive installation documenting her 2012–13 residency at Germany’s Meissen Porcelain Manufactory, founded in 1710, several dozen dreamlike amalgamations of 18th-century figurines and tableware reinterpret porcelain slip-casting by foregrounding its molds. In one emblematic example, the pearly profile of a bear peers out from the chalky, half-open carapace in which it was formed, directing its single gimlet eye at the Orientalizing tropes of period artifacts, as if to turn them inside out.

Most captivating were the 25 standing sculptures from an ongoing series begun in 2007. Each consists of a bulbous, usually hollow clay form, often with protruding feelers or orifices, spanning a fantastically diverse range of textured surface treatments. They balance solo on specifically calibrated understructures—a beveled post, a plywood platform, a ready-made stool—that heighten their insistently anthropomorphic presence. Tattletale (2012), for example, poised on a Plexiglas box, is a ropey, brain-like tangle of coiled clay that appears to be overtaking a stepped concatenation of glazed kiln bricks.

Shechet’s sculptural recourse to firebricks effectively disrupts the boundary between work and kiln. This interest in relationships between object and surrounding, sculpture and support, extends to the design of the exhibition, for which Shechet herself is responsible.

A version of this story originally appeared in the October 2015 issue of ARTnews on page 89.

Arlene Shechet, No Noise, 2013, glazed ceramic on painted wood base.

JOHN KENNARD/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO., NEW YORK

When I met Arlene Shechet, she was in her studio in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, preparing for a talk at Anderson Ranch arts center in Aspen, Colorado. She was looking at installation shots of “All at Once,” her show at the Institute Contemporary Art, Boston, and she was wearing a summery sky-blue button-down. This was on Friday, July 3, a holiday when many Americans were relaxing. Shechet was hard at work.

She moved her cursor over a photo (her mouse sat on pad based on the Rosetta Stone), bringing my attention to the ICA Boston’s version of her 2014 show “Meissen Recast.” For that exhibition, following a residency at the Meissen factory, in Dresden, Shechet mixed and matched porcelain figurines, at times literally breaking their traditional forms to create new abstractions. Asian figures are brought into contact with European ones; teacups are balanced on slanted plates. Set inside a glassed-in cabinet, a new network of figurines is created. “What do you think of this one?” she asked me. Too bleached out, I told her. “I agree, let’s use the ones from my iPhone,” she said. Her assistant scribbled a few notes.

Shechet is thorough, so deciding which pictures to use for her presentation—there were over 60 slides by the time I arrived—was going to take a while. As any artist will tell you, attention to the process, whether it’s creating a PowerPoint for a talk or building a large-scale installation, is important, but that’s especially the case for Shechet, whose ceramics and paper works often involve a very careful sequence of actions to reach a final result. Yet she is far from a perfectionist. She sometimes puts her gelatinous-looking, amorphous clay forms in the kiln with air bubbles or uneven glaze, allowing for little accidents that are out of her control.

Arlene Shechet, So and So and So and So and So and On and On, 2010, glazed ceramic and glazed kiln bricks.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO., NEW YORK

“My way of working has to do with setting up parameters, creating situations, and then, within in those situations, I’m working to discover something rather than creating something I already know,” Shechet told me over lunch at a sunny café nearby. “So, if that is chance, then that is chance, but I think it’s more discovering, searching, and finding.” This, she said, was not quite the same thing as John Cage’s brand of chance, in which anything could happen after a certain set of instructions for experimental music were given.

“I like evidence of how the thing is made,” she continued. “I find that that actually makes something even more mysterious. To know more, strangely, adds mystery. I don’t even want to deconstruct that.” It was like she was demystifying her own process, I suggested, like her sculptures, with their vessels for air and acrylic skins, were very much making clear how she made the works. “But that kind of clarity—what exactly is that making clear?” she asked, rhetorically. “Someone who’s an artist, who can see the process, would maybe start to analyze it in a very concrete way, but most viewers won’t break it apart like that. So, it just is another language.”

Shechet kept bringing up various types of language. She mentioned her titles, which, like her works themselves, are ambiguous. (One work, a pair of reddish conical forms on stacks of kiln bricks, bears the comically frustrating title So and So and So and So and So and On and On.) Rarely ever do her titles provide straightforward answers to her work. “I don’t like to be descriptive, but within it, within the title, there has to be some kind of point,” she said. When I asked about “All at Once,” the title of her ICA Boston show, which was organized by Jenelle Porter, she said that it referred to the fact that it was a 20-year survey of her work. As if that answer was too easy, she also said, “It has to do with some kind of wholeness, some kind of bigger story.”

And, indeed, the larger picture is often the point when it comes to Shechet’s work. It’s easy, and probably even instinctual, to see So and So and So and So and So and On and On, and say that the pot-like clay objects are the work and the kiln bricks are pedestals. Not so, said Shechet. “My point of view is, whatever you’re putting out into the world, that’s what people are looking at. That’s the art. So, I just see it as an entity. The entity is important, from bottom to top, beginning to end, etc. All the parts need each other. They’re all essential.”

This, in a way, was a response to when she began working, in the 1980s, a time when it was assumed that, if you wanted to make a good sculpture, it was going to be in the vein of Minimalism or Post-Minimalism. In other words, no traditional sculptures or pedestals allowed. “It was such a no-no for things not to have pedestals, and I felt like that’s avoiding another interesting sculptural issue,” she said. “I don’t see it as the ceramic is the sculpture. I see it as the whole thing.” In response, she has often included wood, bronze, steel, and concrete as nondescript forms that look like pedestals for her ceramics, but are actually just much a part of the work as the clay objects themselves.

Arlene Shechet, Tattletale (detail), 2012, glazed ceramic, glazed kiln brick and kiln shelf, Plexiglas.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO., NEW YORK

This attention to the entire work, and to the entire process leading up to the entire work, comes out of Shechet’s interest in Asian philosophy, which she first came into contact with during the early ’80s, when she lived in Boston and listened to broadcasts of Alan Watts’ lectures about Zen Buddhism on the radio. She went on to make a series of Hydrocal works shaped like the Buddha and some blue-and-white paper works inspired by the shape of stupas and mandalas. (Shechet calls these paper works the “architecture of the mind.”) “I had studied some Asian art history, so in many ways, Asian art is a great teacher of the principles of Buddhism, Hinduism, those religions,” Shechet said. “I think I knew stuff, and then Alan Watts flowing over me and through me helped me re-learn it.”

History repeatedly winds its way into Shechet’s work. The most notable example is “Meissen Recast,” in which Shechet made the unusual decision to include Asian porcelain figurines, rather than just relying on white ones. She was able to expose the way that porcelain had, in fact, been discovered by the Chinese and then traveled West through trading. But, in much less explicit ways, it also figures into her paper works, whose circular forms allude to centuries-old Hindu temples. When asked about this interest in history, Shechet chuckled. “The present doesn’t even exist!” she said. “We’re always in dialogue with history. It’s just a question of how far back you want to go.”

“Archaeologically, clay is what survives,” she said later. “That’s why I also find it very amusing when people speak about it as fragile and difficult. It’s absolutely the thing that will survive beyond any painting or anything else. Every story about every culture basically comes through a clay shard that’s been found.”

Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado.

COURTESY ANDERSON RANCH

Aspen, Colorado’s renowned artist community Anderson Ranch has announced its lineup for its eight-week Featured Artists & Conversations Series, which brings together artists, critics, collectors, and curators together to participate in panel discussions, Q&As, and lectures.

This year, participating artists include McArthur Binion, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Lizzie Fitch, Trevor Paglen, Arlene Shechet, Alec Soth, Frank Stella, Hank Willis Thomas and Ryan Trecartin. Art collectors Dennis Scholl and Jennifer and David Stockman, curators Dr. Jeffrey Grove and Lisa Phillips, director of the New Museum Toby Devan, and president and CEO of the Aspen Institute Walter Isaacson will also feature in the events lineup. Public events are free, but a reservation is required.

In the past, artists such as Marina Abramović (2013), Theaster Gates (2014), Rashid Johnson (2012), Laurie Simmons (2011), Mickalene Thomas (2010), Bill Viola (2013), and Kara Walker (2012) have been involved in the series, which tends to bring in about 1,500 collectors, patrons, art aficionados, and Anderson students and faculty on select dates throughout Aspen’s summer season.

Glazed and confused with the profusion of ceramics in museums and galleries these days? Here’s an ARTnews guide to trends in contemporary ceramic art, from porcelain that riffs on global trade routes to clay heads that have been decked out with hair extensions and shades.

Face Jars

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Clockwise from top left: William J. O’Brien (2), Rebecca Morgan, Dan McCarthy, Jeffry Mitchell. Click through for more information.

The story of Face Vessels and how they came to the United States is at once fascinating and devastating, as it represents a transmission of Kongo culture through the Middle Passage and into American art. While some may more overtly reference their source material than others, ceramics by Dan McCarthy, William J. O’Brien, and Jeffry Mitchell stand as misshapen totems to a past that is all too often hidden or forgotten.

Creation/Destruction

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Clockwise from top left: Ulrika Strömbäck, Alyson Shotz, Kathy Butterly, Robert Chamberlain, Kaneshige Kōsuke. Click through for more information.

Flattened, crumpled, and collapsed, these ceramic works squeeze out something new by crushing traditional forms. Chunky, un-useable, yet funky, Robert Chamberlain’s vases are created with cake-making equipment in an inventive marriage of domestic instruments. Work by Ulrika Strömbäck and Kathy Butterly toes the line between creation and destruction to thrilling effect.

Mad Hatter’s Tea Party

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Clockwise from top left: Patrick Purcell, Yeesookyung, Jessica Stoller, Arlene Shechet, Mounir Fatmi. Click through for more information.

The work of Patrick Purcell and Yeesookyung features the kind of pageantry, pomp, and artifice that wouldn’t seem out of place at one of the Mad Hatter’s tea parties. In particular, Arlene Shechet’s collaboration with the famed Meissen porcelain factory in Dresden, currently on view at RISD, merges preciousness and opulence with absurdity and a feverish energy. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, these works contain more than a bit of madness and danger, with overt references to death and the tradition of vanitas still life paintings in work by Jessica Stoller and Mounir Fatmi, who was included in the Museum of Arts and Design’s illuminating “Body & Soul: New International Ceramics” exhibition.

Anti-Ceramic Mush

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Clockwise from top left: Lynda Benglis, Beverly Semmes, Rudy Shepherd, Polly Apfelbaum, Sterling Ruby. Click through for more information.

At once raw and sophisticated, spontaneous and deliberate, these ceramics use color and texture to explore themes around gender and race. Work by artists Beverly Semmes, Lynda Benglis and Polly Apfelbaum may be biomorphic, zany and voluptuous, but it comes with a pointed, political edge.

Work that Body

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Clockwise from top left: Sergei Isupov, Jessica Harrison, Alessandro Pessoli (2), Ellen Lesperance. Click through for more information.

Whether glossy and bloodied like Jessica Harrison’s kitschy figurines or rough and paint-splattered like Ellen Lesperance’s densely populated ceramic installations, these works use the varied textures of pottery to push the human form from the corporeal to the transcendental. In the grand tradition of Giacometti, these artists manipulate, strain, and stretch the human frame to transform recognizable figures into something imaginative, dynamic, and often tortured.

Fractured Fairytales

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Clockwise from top left: Allison Schulnik, Miwa Ryôsaku, Klara Kristalova, Kate MacDowell. Click through for more information.

With work that is at turns idyllic and nightmarish, but always surreal, Miwa Ryôsaku and Klara Kristalova reestablish the dark side of the fairytale. Using fables both obscure (The Goose Girl) and popular (Cinderella) as their inspiration, these artists return such Disney-fied tales to their haunted Brothers Grimm origins.

Life’s A Beach

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Clockwise from top left: Lisa Sanditz (2), Betty Woodman, Simone Leigh (2), Allison Schulnik. Click through for more information.

Allison Schulnik and Simone Leigh turn to nature for their inspiration, specifically the beach, crafting everything from heavily textured, impasto conches to sleek and smooth cowries. This trend features a strong environmental slant, with Lisa Sanditz’s ceramic cacti fracturing and splintering under the unnatural stress of commercial interests.

The Ol’ Blue and White

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Chu Teh-Chun, Vase no. 15

Courtesy Marlborough

Clockwise from top left: Ann Agee, Chu Teh-Chun, Jesse Small, Raed Yassin, Chu Teh-Chun. Click through for more information.

These ceramics, by artists including Chu Teh-Chun and Ann Agee, resemble the classic blue and white pottery that sprang out of Asia in the 14th century to sail around the world as a hot commodity on global trade routes. Younger artists Jesse Small and Raed Yassin repurpose the iconic blue-and-white motif for a contemporary audience; Small’s Triton Ghost #1 recalls the origins of the porcelain trade as well as Ms. Pac Man.

Portraiture

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Clockwise from top left: Teresa Gironès, James Thomas, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, James Thomas. Click through for more information.

In Teresa Gironès and Magdalena Suarez Frimkess’s coarse, almost-unfinished ceramics, a depth of feeling threatens to burst through. In a similar vein, James Thomas’s busts, equipped with Donald Trump-style wigs and oversized ’80s glasses, portray fully realized characters with outright humor, but also a surprising tenderness at the fragility of people as they age.

Ceramics in 2D

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Clockwise from top left: Friedrich Kunath, Janet Fish, Liz Glynn, Mary Jo Vath. Click through for more information.

Paintings ranging from Janet Fish’s intricately patterned cup and saucer to Mary Jo Vath’s somber and sinister nature morte bring crockery to the canvas, updating the tradition of the Dutch still life to contemporary life. In yet another medium, Liz Glynn uses papier-mâché to emulate the raw heft and craggy history only ceramics can generate.