As part of Upstate Art Weekend, please join us for an Art21 screening of short documentary films on the artistic practices of James Turrell and Arlene Shechet—both of whose work will be on view at CAS. The screening will be followed by a talk back and conversation. Free and open to all.
About the Artists
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.
James Turrell (b. 1943, Los Angeles) creates often unclassifiable work that examines the perceptual effects of light, color, and space in a range of forms across more than five decades of practice. This singular approach to art making is influenced by many unique aspects of his personal biography, from his Quaker upbringing in California, to his later studies in mathematics and psychology, and his one-time career as a pilot and an aerial cartographer.
Turrell’s work—particularly his immersive and luminous light- and color-drenched installations—has become increasingly recognized in the field of contemporary art, and his prominence reached new heights in 2013, when he was honored with a three-part retrospective shown simultaneously at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in Texas. He is perhaps best known as the creator of contemporary art’s greatest unfinished masterpiece, Roden Crater, a large-scale artwork created within a dormant volcano located in the Arizona desert, which he has been developing since 1977.