Visual Art > Sculpture Archives - Page 9 of 9

Kara Walker

Walker always insisted that her job was to jolt viewers out of their comfort zone, and even make them angry, once remarking “I make art for anyone who’s forgot what it feels like to put up a fight.” In 2007, TIME magazine featured Walker on its list of the 100 most influential Americans. In 2008 when the artist was still in her thirties, The Whitney held a retrospective of Walker’s work. Though Walker herself is still in mid-career, her illustrious example has emboldened a generation of slightly younger artists to investigate the persistence and complexity of racial stereotyping.

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Though she is little known, Baroness Elsa Freytag-Loringhoven helped to shape the direction of New York Dada with her eccentric public displays and performances as well as with her desire to fuse her sexuality with her art. In the face of accusations that she was “crazy,” Freytag-Loringhoven would simply state, “Every artist is crazy with respect to ordinary life.” Her gender bending and blatant displays of her sexuality anticipated Feminist art and performance of the mid-20th century. She was an innovative artist whose works paved the way for later experimental Performance art of the late 1950s and 1960s. A renowned poet and a proto-feminist, Elsa and her work have only recently been rediscovered by art historians who have recognized the importance of her contribution to New York Dada. Her provocative poetry was published posthumously in 2011 in Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. At the very forefront of developing the readymade and performance art, the Baroness holds a legacy as the “Mama of Dada,” as the New York Times critic Holland Cotter dubbed her.

Adrian Piper

Piper’s distinctly confrontational ability to address pertinent topics around racial segregation and stereotyping have established her voice as one which is fearless, powerful, and hugely influential.

Edmonia Lewis

Edmonia Lewis is considered the first professional BIPOC sculptor in the United States and the first to achieve international acclaim. Even though much of her work has not survived into the 21st century, Lewis used her art to depict the stories of women and Indigenous people with reverence and beauty. Shattering gender and racial expectations in the 19th-century U.S., her life story is a testament to the ability to succeed despite adversity.

Selma Hortense Burke

Selma Burke discovered her love for sculpture as a young child and followed her passion to Harlem Renaissance New York, Parisian art studios, and even the White House. The artist behind President Franklin Roosevelt’s image on the dime, she was a dedicated art teacher and one of the most notable sculptors of the twentieth century.

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois was a French-American artist, best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art. Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker, and explored themes such as domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious, as well as fear, vulnerability, and loss of control. She considered art therepeutic, and used her work to process difficult events from her childhood. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not officially affiliated with a particular artistic movement.
With the rise of feminism in the United States, her work found a wider audience. Although she rejected the idea that her art was feminist, Bourgeois’s subject was usually the feminine. Works such as Femme Maison (1946-1947), Torso self-portrait (1963-1964), and Arch of Hysteria (1993), all depict the female body. In the late 1960s, her imagery became more explicitly sexual, in works such as Janus Fleuri (1968), as she explored the relationship between men and women and the emotional impact of her troubled childhood. “My work deals with problems that are pre-gender,” she wrote. “For example, jealousy is not male or female.” Despite this assertion, Femme Maison was featured on the cover of Lucy Lippard’s 1976 book From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art and the sculpture became an icon of the feminist art movement

Una Vincenzo

Perhaps best known as the the long-time lesbian partner of Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness, sculptor and translator Una Troubridge was an educated woman with achievements in her own right.

Luisa Roldán

Luisa Ignacia Roldán was a Spanish sculptor of the Baroque Era, and the first woman sculptor documented in Spain.