Porcelain Matters: Retelling, Recasting
A Conversation with Arlene Shechet

Bard Graduate Center welcomes acclaimed American sculptor Arlene Shechet—whose new exhibition at Storm King Art Center, Girl Group, runs through November 10—for an evening of conversation with Sèvres Extraordinaire! curator Charlotte Vignon. Shechet, known for her experiments with materials, form, and motion, has explored three hundred years of ceramic history through her art and curation. In 2016, Shechet curated, with Vignon, an exhibition at the Frick Collection entitled Porcelain, No Simple Matter: Arlene Shechet and the Arnold Collection, presenting works made during a residency at the Meissen factory. Currently, Shechet is working on a new piece in conjunction with a book being published by the Frick Collection—a creative response and a counterpoint to the museum’s eighteenth-century Sèvres vase, called Vase Japon.

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Arlene Shechet is a sculptor known for her effortless combination of disparate elements, precarious and provisional arrangements, and boundary-collapsing visual paradoxes. With gravity-defying work that seems to tilt, contort, bend, and melt, Shechet’s sculptures appear to be set in motion while remaining still, unearthing the expressive potential of material and forms and inviting us to sit with—and move around—its contradictions. Highly technical and yet entirely intuitive, her work embraces improvisation and seeks to examine the humor and pathos of being alive and in a body. Shechet has changed the landscape of ceramics since she began working with clay in 2007. Embracing the inherent duality in clay—its malleability and ability to hold still, its fragility and hardened strength—Shechet has led a resurgence of ceramic work in contemporary art through her experiments with glazes, hybrid forms, and pedestals by embracing risk, rejecting binaries, and leaning into—and driving dialogue between—the underlying tensions of not only form and material, but life itself. 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. In 2023, Schechet 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 Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. 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 the Hudson Valley.