Some creators want to find something that brings them success and then repeat that success. Artist Arlene Shechet, whose six large sculptures created within the past year are being showcased at the 500-acre Storm King Art Center off Route 32 south of Newburgh from now until November 10, is not treading that path. Her shiny new colored outdoor sculptures, the highest over 20 feet tall, are larger than anything she has ever done. The works stand out among those of their more restrained colleagues for their use of vibrant color.
“The art industry wants to keep you attached to one thing,” the 73-year-old artist explained in a Storm King talk on June 1. “I don’t like that.” It was important for a creative artist to avoid commodification, she added, the treating of something as a mere commodity.
Her six enlarged welded metal works were translations, not blowups, of her previous work, Shechet said. They were an evolution conceived to live in an outdoor environment.
Her previous experience with public art were her sculptures in Madison Square Park, a six-acre open space north of the Flatiron Building in Manhattan run by a public conservancy. Most people walking past were hurrying somewhere else. What would works of art have to have to attract their attention? How about a playground?
Being in the countryside allowed a less hurried approach, said Shechet, standing last Saturday afternoon before a microphone in front of a row of century-old oak trees taking their own sweet time deciding where their next new branches would spread. “I wanted the experience of space,” she said. “I love it.”
The six sculptures, each using two colors plus welded-metal surfaced, stood as separate pieces while relating to each other as an ensemble. “As a group, they speak to each other continuously” was the way Shechet expressed it.
They also engage in conversation with their creator. “The works speak back,” Shechet disclosed, “and tell me what they need to be.”
After the works have chatted a while, they’re probably going to be shipped off to separate destinations. One may stay at Storm King. No arrangements have yet been announced.
One never knows, When separated, the siblings may exchange Facebook postings about their new circumstances.
The title of the overall show, “Girl Group,” has attracted a disproportionate share of attention among those with little sympathy for gentle sarcasm. Shechet explained in the question-and-answer phase of her talk that she had come up with the word “group” first, and that when “girl” popped into her head she knew it was the right companion word. Unsurprisingly, the appellation – not without its validity – has exacerbated the macho-metal-male versus impudent-female theme eagerly picked up by numerous reviewers of the Storm King show.
The artist’s terse explanation for the genesis of the project in August 2020: “I needed color therapy.”
The greater number of Shechet pieces that have been placed near the museum building are flanked by Storm King’s modest collection of incomparable David Smith sculptures – both abstract pieces and found objects – which had formed the outdoor museum’s original core of work, and by Louise Nevelson’s majestic steel painted black City on the High Mountains, assembled in 1983. They’re good company.
The artist said she enjoys the colloquy among the works. The outdoor art museum makes an ideal location for individual experiences.
The six new Shechet pieces at Storm King are titled Maiden May, Rapunzel, Dawn, Midnight, Bop Blue and As April.
Like the curatorial staff of Storm King, Shechet talked of their setting as the Hudson Valley. You know the story: The Thomas Cole’s landscape paintings of two centuries ago had marked the birth of the Hudson River School of painting, In the same generic manner, the Cheez-In pop-up that invaded Woodstock the previous week had talked of its north-of-New-York-City location as “The Catskills.”
Arlene Shechet and her family have residences in New York City’s Tribeca district and in Woodstock. They bought their house in Woodstock about 15 years ago.
The lion’s share of the formidable amount of planning and organization required for “Girl Group” was done out of Woodstock, and the fabrication took place in a large Kingston studio space. To complete “Girl Group,” the hard-working artist supervised three studio art workers and six fabricators.
To my imperfect knowledge, Shechet is not well-known in the Woodstock art community. She’s in a different universe. She has spent her time flitting to various places around the world.
It seems that Shechet’s sense of place is more global than regional, and more regional than local. Those choices necessarily involve both gain and loss.
The sole public sculpture of similar magnitude in Woodstock to Shechet’s work is the 15-ton piece of bluestone at the highest point of the artists’ cemetery raised in place by Tomas Penning and friends in the 1950s and containing the James Shotwell message, “Encircled by the everlasting hills, they rest here who added to the beauty of the world by art, creative thought, and by life itself.”
One of the art-magazine critics described Shechet as “insatiably curious,” That’s not a bad quality for any sentient being to have.
When she was a small girl growing up in Queens, her parents used to ask Shechet what she wanted to be as a grownup. Her reply that she wanted to be a farmer or a factory worker didn’t please them. Later, she amended her answer. She wanted to be an adventurer.
She said in her talk that she had fulfilled her ambitions. In her present occupation, she is now a farmer, a factory worker, and an adventurer.
Among the public collections and solo exhibitions that have featured Shechet’s work are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum and the Jewish Museum in New York City, the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Hasher Cultural Center in Dallas, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
She exhibits at the Pace Gallery in New York City.
Locally, her work is at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum.
Join the family! 
