New York-based artist Arlene Shechet has forged a career creating sculptures that defy her medium’s longstanding conventions. Pieces suggest a universe liberated from the shackles of rigid hierarchies and freed from reductive identarian notions—a regeneration, a different kind of dawning. In _Skirts_, her first solo exhibition at Pace Gallery, New York this spring, Shechet presents her latest works: large but still human-scaled sculptures that juxtapose disparate materials, including historically marginalized ones such as ceramics, in a wide array of forms, ranging from the biomorphic to the geometric. As suggested by the show’s witty, multivalent title—a verb, sculptural term, and misogynist expression—her art obliquely addresses the enduring gender disparities structuring the art world and, more broadly, contemporary society. In anticipation of _Skirts_, fellow upstate sculptor and installation art contemporary, Judy Pfaff, visited Shechet’s studio to reflect on their respective careers navigating the oft-inhospitable waters of the art world, fearlessness, process, and spirituality.
**Judy Pfaff:** The first time I saw your work was in _Art on Paper_. You had the cover?
**Arlene Shechet:** Yes!
**JP:** And I was like, ‘who’s doing that? I’m really jealous.’ Beautiful paper vessels in blue and white. I didn’t realize that the imagery on the pots were of the plans of stupas and also referenced Delft Blue porcelain. Anyway, so many sets of opposites in this and most of your work. Someone said of your work that they are “diagrams of cognitive dissonance—or of just how complicated the world is.” You had an interview online with Jane...
**AS:** Dickson? Jane Dickson?
**JP:** Yes! It seemed that she knows you really well. I hope this goes as good as that!
**AS:** Judy, the thing that she didn’t have that you have is a deep understanding of what it means to be a sculptor, which is so much its own language and so much in our bodies, right? I was telling somebody the other day that if a painter comes by, or is even in my house, they always put themselves in one spot in relation to the thing. And it made me think about a linear language as opposed to the sculpture which is a circular language.
**JP:** It seems to me that if you make something in 3D, you can add and subtract over time, always watching, physically in space, becoming, waiting for it to make sense, and you don’t really know what it is. The making reveals itself.
**AS:** Because you don’t know yet. It’s like meeting a new character, new person. I think it might be true of all art that is successful. I’m about to have a show and I don’t know it. And that’s one of the reasons to have a show. I mean, there are the obvious pedestrian reasons to have a show and necessary reasons to have a show and I want to share the work outside of my body. I want to be in the world with the work but I’m just looking forward to learning what the work is by seeing it outside of my studio and putting it together in a different rhythm.
ARLENE SHECHET “DEEP DIVE” 2020. GLAZED CERAMIC, PAINTED HARDWOOD, STEEL. 40 x 40 x 23 IN. © ARLENE SHECHET, COURTESY PACE GALLERY. PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHOEBE D’HEURLE.
**JP:** It’s been thrilling to watch the pace of your growth, the amping up of materials and scale in the last few years, Arlene. You worked with paper, then clay, adding wood, steel, glass. You add a new material, a new element, a new level of understanding. In the city you do the thinking and the model-making. In Woodstock, you work on the clay. You’re like on fire. Your new studio is in Kingston with big stuff, wood, trees, major trees! And then I was thinking about the choice of Woodstock as a spiritual center, home of Byrdcliffe, the oldest center for the arts and crafts movement.
**AS:** That’s the reason I moved here.
**JP:** I was wondering, are you following your intuition or what you need? What your body needs? What your thoughts need?
**AS:** No, but I do operate in the world intuitively, and the Woodstock thing really happened after 9/11; the city went from being my dream, no problems, everything is perfect, to the next morning being like ‘get me out of here.’
**JP:** Woodstock, it’s a special place. And people got it a very long time ago. My introduction to Byrdcliffe was through the research of Tom Wolf. He walked me around and it became clear of its importance as a utopian and spiritual community. It’s the land of clay, wood, stone, cement, bluestone. Kingston, where your new studio is now, is where all the brick, stone, and cement were made that built so much of New York City and the Brooklyn Bridge. So much history here.
**AS:** It is deep here because it’s a real place and there’s a lot of interesting architecture. It’s sad that a lot of things got taken down. It was the first capital of New York. I am an architecture buff.
**JP:** I think we share that too! So much has happened to you Arlene, amazing things. You have tested venerable institutions, you’ve organized a retrospective of 20-years work, and managed to produce outdoor gigantic porcelain sculpture, and in a few days, opening a show of new work at Pace. At The Frick, you were the first living artist there! They must have trusted you in a deep way.
**AS:** It grew. For instance at The Frick, that goes back to the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, so I was working at the Meissen Porcelain Factory. I didn’t know exactly why I was doing that except that I loved factories and seeing early industrial architecture. I was traveling back and forth to Germany.
**JP:** Rhode Island has a tradition of porcelain?
**AS:** Abby Aldrich Rockefeller gave an amazing collection of porcelain; the porcelain room \[at RISDM\] hadn’t been touched in 30 years and nobody cared about it. I was researching a lot, so then I did a big installation at the museum and reinvented their porcelain room and their practices of exhibiting porcelain.
**JP:** How long did that take?
**AS:** I worked on that for about a year and then I did a contemporary. I love the idea of screwing around with these, so the more pokey and silly that something is—like when I first started working on ceramics, that was certainly deemed a dumb, marginalized material. So seeing this Meissen tradition, it was so marginalized that even the museum couldn’t have cared less, but I think they knew to think about all of their collections.
**JP:** You were also an alumna at that point?
**AS:** Yes. When The Frick asked me to do it, that really came because I did this project at The Rhode Island School of Design. The curator of Decorative Arts at The Frick had heard about it and the director had actually gone there and seen it. I think they thought that I was going to install this Meissen collection in the cases they had. I went and tried, thinking about it and thought, ‘I can’t do it.’
**JP:** Did you change it?
**AS:** I changed everything. I couldn’t change how you entered the room, but I built all of the furniture based on furniture related to what else was in it.
**JP:** It didn’t come from a big idea?
**AS:** No.
**JP:** Is that true for most things?
**AS:** Yes. I want to feel my way through it. It’s sort of what I say about building sculpture, I never liked the idea of making a drawing, it just bores me to death. I feel like time is better spent just feeling it and visiting. I probably made 20 visits there.
ARLENE SHECHET “IN MY VIEW” 2020. GLAZED CERAMIC, PAINTED HARDWOOD, PAINTED PLYWOOD. 58 x 26 x 20 IN. © ARLENE SHECHET, COURTESY PACE GALLERY. PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHOEBE D’HEURLE.
**JP:** So the thing I should really talk about is this new show coming out. What I was sensing was the Madison Square Park show \[_Full Steam Ahead_\] pushed your boundaries a lot. The scale of it. The enormous consideration of how it was used. You also changed the structure of the benches. You were pushing the limits of porcelain. And then I thought, she’s fearless.
**AS:** I’m not fearless.
**JP:** Oh god, it sure looks that way.
**AS:** C’mon Judy.
**JP:** No, really. What I think is impressive to me is that all your work has a kind of elegance, you seem to really understand where you want to take the work. You mix things, not just color, not just geometry, some come from the body, some come from music or compositional things. There’s a density and an openness with your decisions within the work so the scale now is heroic.
**AS:** I mean it’s not heroic in terms of sculpture. Heroic for me.
**JP:** For you and the materials you’re using.
**AS:** Yes, I’m pushing new materials.
**JP:** You don’t flirt, you power through. You are present.
**AS:** I think it comes from having a good husband and having children and having all those years of not having a lot of time to work, so I’m letting it rip. My kids and my family are primary, and I feel so lucky to have that. And all of them are big characters in my life. Basically, late at night trying to see if I could do anything, sometimes in an exhausted state. I had a lot of pent up energy and ambition.
**JP:** Can you talk about that?
**AS:** I want to own ambition. I think we can talk about ambition in relation to gender. Because people say crazy shit to me, like ‘I don’t know how you do it!’ Or even back then, as you know, being a woman in the art world, having children was not something that you were welcomed to do. No one did it. Somebody in their 20’s was talking to me over the weekend and said, ‘Oh, all my friends in their early 30’s are going crazy,’ and this person was an artist. ‘They’re going crazy because they’re worried about having children and stuff like that.’ Then she said, ‘Were you worried about that when you were in your 20’s? I said ‘opposite.’ Now, I see that I got off easy because the idea was that you were not supposed to have children, that actually having a relationship was a wish and a prayer. I mean Judy you had several marriages.
**JP:** Three.
**AS:** I know, I looked up to you for that. Even that was a no-no. The whole thing of any kind of family was a contradiction of your seriousness.
**JP:** The best work is being done by women. A long time ago in the early ‘80s I was in a show in Cologne, Germany called _Westkunst_. It was a survey from 1939 to 1981, and there were no women in that show. Hundreds of American and European artists—no women in the historical section. There was a corridor for emerging called _Heute_, which had three women. It was not apparent to me then how the women artists had disappeared, perhaps because I was being treated well.
**AS:** One step forward, three steps backward. There’s a great podcast series that Helen \[Molesworth\] is doing in conjunction with The Getty. I just listened to Lee Krasner. It’s using original voices. You got treated well, but not as well as you should have been treated, Judy! If you were a guy, you would have been raking it in and having your choice on galleries.
**JP:** So Pace.
**AS:** Pace.
**JP:** It represents a staple but it also has a cache. It’s powerful. This is another step.
**AS:** Yeah, it’s another step.
**JP:** I think it would be interesting on how it affects you. You’re like kicking ass in there so it seems like you’re on good footing. By the way, is some of that flocking? Is that a green in there, is that a glaze?
**AS:** It’s a glaze.
**JP:** Where did you think you got the confidence to make these moves? Even within tradition, with outside work, with jumping to this. Did it ever feel like, ‘I’m not worthy?’
**AS:** No, it felt like ‘I’m gonna die.’
**JP:** And you might as well do this now?
**AS:** Not just now. There was a big turning point in my life where my best friend from art school, Carole Bale, got a horrible variant form of cancer in her 30’s, and went from being completely beyond alive to dying in a space of a year. She was in Boston then and I had moved to New York. But I spent a lot of time going back and forth and being with her as much as possible and being with her through to the end. Seeing that progression from life to death in such rapid succession woke me. I was so upset and grief-stricken when she died. I woke up one morning and I felt for the first time, ‘Yes, I’m going to die.’ I felt it. It was in my brain. And also I felt like the only way to honor this person’s life was to live as fully as possible. I completely threw out everything in my studio, and that’s when I got more deeper into the Buddhist stuff. I started making the plaster work.
**JP:** Did you have a teacher?
**AS:** I think \[Joseph\] Goldstein was the teacher who I went to talk with but I knew some great Zen teachers. I didn’t have a teacher, I had multiple wise teachers.
**JP:** Did you travel a lot?
**AS:** I traveled to Asia. Indonesia. That was an impactful experience, which bled out into my work all those years later. Basically it was me saying, ‘I’m gonna die. What the fuck is there to be afraid of?’
**JP:** Click, it worked.
**AS:** I mean I certainly have lots of fearful anxious times.
**JP:** I just started this foundation and I keep thinking, ‘Oh when I’m dead this will work like this and this will work like that.’ And I could see it now. So my planning is kind of being enthusiastic about my death. I know some people think, ‘What are they gonna say about me when I die?’ So there’s this preparing for the foundation and how it’s going to work. There will be classes, it’s kind of exciting for me! I had never given my thought to dying.
**AS:** Because you and your work is exuberant of life. That is the same thing you’re asking me. I want my work to be of life, like yours is. Judy, you are the teacher of that. I moved to New York and thought this is the ‘most genius thing I ever saw.’ That kind of ‘of life’ thing.
ARLENE SHECHET “UNDER CHERRY TREES/ THERE ARE/ NO STRANGERS” 2020. PAINTED HARDWOOD, GLAZED CERAMIC. 70 x 29 x 24 IN. © ARLENE SHECHET, COURTESY PACE GALLERY. PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHOEBE D’HEURLE.
**JP:** Do you know how organized you are?
**AS:** Yeah, I am organized. I am. But that also is part of being a parent. That taught me a lot—on top of being a fast cook. And I don’t have that much trouble making decisions.
**JP:** I think that’s from you being present. I go around and around and around.
**AS:** I don’t see that in your work.
**JP:** I know! Because in the last minute I’m like, ‘I can’t fuck around anymore I have to make this decision now.’ But I think that if I had more structure or more confidence or was raised differently, I could get there sooner. I think I waste a lot of work time worrying about things. Everything I’ve read about you is pretty fucking great. They get it. But when I read about myself…
**AS:** You hate it?
**JP:** I _hate_ it.
**AS:** I don’t read that much.
**JP:** Is there anything you want more noticed?
**AS:** That’s such a good question. Well, there has been a lot of conversation about the base. I understand that, but I also don’t understand it because I took that for granted early on. Before I came upstate, I started using big blocks of wood. I had this show called _Turn Up The Bass_ at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. I was going to explode it in a way. There is no separation for me. The thing that happens, and continues to happen, and what you will see in this show is I’ll make a wood part or a ceramic part and one is cast from the other. So casting the ceramics off of the wood is generative. The whole thing is that one thing leads to the next, and so it should be incredibly apparent that it’s not that I’m seeing one thing as separate from the other, but I don’t mind that either. It’s not radically different from what I’ve been doing my whole life as an artist. What do you hate that people say about you?
**JP:** That it’s kind of ‘fun stuff,’ meaning lightweight, mentally lightweight, or giddy, or riotous, or an explosion in a glitter factory. That’s the sentence that followed me for years, and at that time, there was no glitter. I was thinking, ‘I love glitter but it’s not in it.’ Or it’s all fluorescent colors and it’s not. It’s sort of lesser language.
**AS:** That’s the gender…
**JP:** I think they should give you better words. If you think so, I think so, too. You know that when there’s a quip or a one-sentence synopsis it sort of has this...I don’t know if it’s humor exactly. I don’t know if it’s funny, but there’s a deepness in it that interests me.
**AS:** Well I think the idea that you poked at just now of intellect is something that I thought a lot about. I feel that intellect and beauty are seen as opposites, especially if you are a woman. The opportunity to not see intelligence or intellect or meaning in the work of women is preordained, but I don’t think Matisse or these people were ever questioned. I think people who make appealing or provocative things, people who can understand on a material level, should not be questioned about their intellect or the meaning of their work. It does not exist in opposition. I guess my interest in the decorative arts is really pushing on that, ‘Okay you’re really gonna work with porcelain and have to take it seriously?’ I mean yeah, ‘cause I’m fucking smart. But also lots of other people have done that same thing, you’re just looking the other way because it’s unfamiliar territory. I don’t want to give the words that somebody else writes too much power over me, you know?
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