Arlene Shechet at Catskill Art Space July 5 - August 23, 2025
Livingston Manor, NY – 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 this year’s exhibition, Arlene Shechet, the Kingston and Woodstock-based sculptor, will exhibit new and recent sculptures, works on paper, and tapestries. Arlene Shechet opens July 5, 2025, with an artist talk from 3-4pm and a reception from 4-5pm. The exhibition continues 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 now maintains two separate studios. Last summer, for the first time, Shechet was able not only make work in the Hudson Valley, but also was able to create an ambitious 6-month exhibition at Storm King Art Center. On the heels of this wide-sweeping presentation, Shechet’s forthcoming exhibition at Catskill Art Space celebrates her more intimate sculptures along with her ambitions and curiosities.
Shechet’s pioneering sculptures fuse seemingly disparate parts—clay, steel, wood—to sublime effect. She explores the capacity of clay, both fixed and dynamic, with her experiments in glaze, texture and organic forms. Shechet’s ceramic surfaces produce mesmerizing tactile effects evocative of moss and other elements of the natural world specific to the Catskills. At the same time, her work is decidedly otherworldly, juxtaposing polymorphous and geometric forms that capture the complexity and incongruity of the human experience. In her exploration of the materiality of clay, she includes works on paper produced with imprints of clay—specters of the fixed forms seen elsewhere. These wall works will be joined by rarely seen textiles that capture Shechet’s sensitivity to color, form, mark making and scale.
For her presentation at CAS, Shechet will recreate a wall of her studio that the artist thinks of as her "library.” A plywood backed wall with reductive shelving houses the visual vernacular that represents both a history and an ongoing and changing resource for the artist. Shechet utilizes these accumulated wood and ceramic pieces in her improvisational and intuitive method of sketching in three-dimension. This never-before-seen glimpse into the studio provides a privileged and intimate glance into Shechet’s practice and commitment to making her “process visible.”
Initially developed for Storm King Art Center, Shechet will debut a new series of Pleat Seats, an artist-designed seating from sumptuous carved Italian marble that continue her practice of material exploration, laying bare her process. The works invite deeper contemplation of the work on view, as well as shared conversation between viewers.
The exhibition will be complemented by an eponymous catalogue including works from the exhibition. Art historian Nancy Princenthal is contributing 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.
Long-term Installations
Following a major renovation and expansion, Catskill Art Space reopened in October 2022 with a long-term presentation of James Turrell’s Avaar (1982) in a custom-built gallery on the building’s second floor. A room-sized installation, Avaar is an important example of the artist’s early, wall-based “aperture” works, which function by creating two areas within a room. There is a “viewing space,” where one stands to see and experience the work, and a “sensing space,” which is an ambiguously defined area of diffused light. Avaar is one of the rare examples of Turrell’s aperture works to make use of white lighting only; no colors will be present in the installation. This work is in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum, which has granted CAS a special long-term loan to exhibit the work. The presentation at CAS marks the first time the work has been shown since the 1970s, giving audiences from the Catskills and beyond the rare opportunity to experience a major Turrell work that has not been seen in nearly five decades.
On the second floor’s central landing, Sol LeWitt’s vibrant Wall Drawing #992 unfolds in three sections, each consisting of 10,000 straight lines drawn in color marker, to create a mesmerizing arrangement of primary colors. On the fourth wall, presenting LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #991, straight, arced, and organic lines will encompass the wall in black marker and pencil. The conceptual, minimalist artist conceived guidelines for his two-dimensional works to be drawn directly on the wall. Much like Turrell’s Avaar, the LeWitt works were realized for CAS’s space; in this instance, they are generously loaned by the artist’s estate. This work was overseen by a draftsperson, who determines the length and placement of the lines, and executed by five artists local to the area over nearly two weeks.
The newly realized performance space on CAS’s second floor hosts British sculptor Francis Cape’s A Gathering of Utopian Benches—an installation of meticulous copies of benches built and used by communal societies. Cape’s installations have always argued that design and craft express belief. Utopian Benches, which has toured extensively throughout the US, was built from poplar grown near Cape’s studio in Narrowsburg, NY. To be considered both as contemporary sculpture as well as furniture that visitors can actively use, the benches reference the societies who first used them, inviting visitors to utilize them for exchange, discourse, and community. The installation, which is meant to be used by visitors both for contemplation and may be used for performance seating, overlooks an expansive wall of windows onto the Willowemoc Creek.
Ellen Brooks inaugurates an intimate gallery space, framed by a partially open staircase, with Hang (2022), an installation suspending over 30 feet of scrolls of film negatives from the ceiling. The artist hangs transparencies and negatives in all formats and from clips attached to the ceiling, mimicking the practice of film photography. Hanging negatives reference the surrounding natural landscaping, evoking a cascading waterfall with coils of film collecting on the ground floor gallery.
About Catskill Art Space
Catskill Art Space (CAS) explores contemporary art practices of emerging and established artists. Through exhibitions, performances, classes, lectures, and screenings, CAS fosters creative community in the Catskills.
Established as Catskill Art Society in 1971, CAS reopened in October 2022 as Catskill Art Space following a major renovation and expansion of its multi-arts center, located in the picturesque hamlet of Livingston Manor in the Western Catskills. CAS presents a rotating slate of exhibitions, performances and other events featuring national and regional talents, alongside long-term installations of works by James Turrell, Sol LeWitt, Francis Cape, and Ellen Brooks. Learn more at catskillartspace.org.
Notes to Editor
Exhibition Title: Arlene Shechet
Opening date: July 5, 2025
Address: Catskill Art Space, 48 Main St. Livingston Manor, NY 12758
Opening: Saturday, July 5. Artist talk 3-4pm, Reception 4-5pm
Exhibition on-view: July 5 – August 23, 2025
Long-term installations on view: Long-term presentation (through 2027) of James Turrell’s light installation Avaar (1982) and two site-specific wall drawings from Sol LeWitt, as well as solo presentations of well-established artists from the local area, Francis Cape (through 2027) and Ellen Brooks (through 2027).
Instagram: @catskillartspace
For media inquiries, please contact:
Sally Wright, Executive Director
646-696-1044
