arlene shechet

Each summer Catskill Art Space (CAS) invites a prominent artist local to the region to overtake the ground floor galleries facing Livingston Manor’s Main Street. For the 2025 exhibition, Arlene Shechet, the Kingston- and Woodstock-based sculptor, exhibited new and recent sculptures, works on paper, and tapestries. Arlene Shechet opened on July 5, 2025, with an artist talk from 3–4pm and a reception from 4–5pm. The exhibition continued through August 23, 2025.

Shechet, born and raised in New York City, worked for years in a basement studio in Tribeca. Nearly 20 years ago, she began to shift her studio to the Hudson Valley where she maintained two separate studios. Last summer, for the first time, Shechet was able not only to make work in the Hudson Valley, but also to create an ambitious six-month exhibition at Storm King Art Center. On the heels of this wide-sweeping presentation, Shechet’s exhibition at Catskill Art Space celebrated her more intimate sculptures along with her ambitions and curiosities.

Shechet’s pioneering sculptures fused seemingly disparate parts—clay, steel, wood—to sublime effect. She explored the capacity of clay, both fixed and dynamic, with her experiments in glaze, texture, and organic forms. Shechet’s ceramic surfaces produced mesmerizing tactile effects evocative of moss and other elements of the natural world specific to the Catskills. At the same time, her work was decidedly otherworldly, juxtaposing polymorphous and geometric forms that captured the complexity and incongruity of the human experience. In her exploration of the materiality of clay, she included works on paper produced with imprints of clay—specters of the fixed forms seen elsewhere. These wall works were joined by rarely seen textiles that captured Shechet’s sensitivity to color, form, mark making, and scale.

For her presentation at CAS, Shechet recreated a wall of her studio that the artist thought of as her "library.” A plywood-backed wall with reductive shelving housed the visual vernacular that represented both a history and an ongoing and changing resource for the artist. Shechet utilized these accumulated wood and ceramic pieces in her improvisational and intuitive method of sketching in three dimensions. This never-before-seen glimpse into the studio provided a privileged and intimate glance into Shechet’s practice and commitment to making her “process visible.”

Initially developed for Storm King Art Center, Shechet debuted a new series of Pleat Seats, an artist-designed seating from sumptuous carved Italian marble that continued her practice of material exploration, laying bare her process. The works invited deeper contemplation of the work on view, as well as shared conversation between viewers.

The exhibition was complemented by an eponymous catalogue including works from the exhibition. Art historian Nancy Princenthal contributed a new critical essay on the presentation at CAS.

About the Artist

Arlene 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 (2016-17), 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 Painters & Sculptors Grant, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 2024, one of the monumental sculptures from her much lauded exhibition, Girl Group, was acquired by Storm King Art Center for their permanent collection. 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 Upstate New York.