Arlene Shechet

Work

Shechet's early work was influenced by Buddhism, evident in the way it exhibited states of transformation and Buddhist subject matter. In the early '90s, Shechet made a series of plaster sculptures. The lumpy works, supported by industrial and found objects, and incorporating Buddhist iconography, evolved into a family of Buddhas. In 1996 Shechet was invited to work at the Dieu Donné Papermill in New York. During her residency she created handmade, paper blueprints of stupas as well as paper vessels.

Shechet continues to work with paper, implementing a hybrid approach by manipulating paper pulp in a similar fashion to clay. Her recent body of colorful paper works, completed in 2012, reveal her commitment to materials and the mold.

Her fascination with materials extends to clay, for which she is primarily know and has received wide recognition. Over the last decade, Shechet has worked prolifically with clay, creating an impressive body of work and pushing the boundaries of the material. From 2012 to 2013, Shechet held a residency at the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory in Germany, where she made experimental sculptures alongside factory employees making traditional porcelain work. Her time there yielded a new body of work which was installed by Shechet at the RISD Museum, Providence in 2014.

In 2013 for The New York Times, Roberta Smith described Shechet's work as combining painting and sculpture "with exuberant polymorphous, often comic results", and noted the variety of glazed surfaces on the vessels in her exhibition Slip, at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. A New Yorker capsule review compared the work in this same exhibition to those of the ceramic artist and printmaker Ken Price. Shechet has also cited references as diverse as Elie Nadelman, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Jim Nutt, and Umberto Boccioni.

Shechet is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York.

Early Life and education

Shechet was raised in Forest Hills, Queens. She received her Bachelor of Arts from New York University and her Masters of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Exhibitions

Solo museum exhibitions of Shechet’s work include the RISD Museum, Providence in 2014; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, in 2013; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas in 2012; The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY in 2009; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 2009. A twenty-year survey of her work opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in June 2015. Shechet is the first living artist to have an exhibition at the Frick Collection, New York, which is on view in 2016-2017. She has an exhibition at The Phillips Collection, DC in 2016-2017.

Collections

Shechet's work is included in museums and public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey; the RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Awards

Shechet has received numerous awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship Award in 2004, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2010, an American Arts and Letters Award in 2011, and three New York Foundation for the Arts awards.