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Description
Porcelain Matters: Retelling, Recasting
A Conversation with Arlene Shechet (Artist)
Wednesday, September 10, 2025 at 6:00 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall
gallery@bgc.bard.edu
$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members
Bard Graduate Center welcomes acclaimed American sculptor Arlene Shechet for an evening of conversation with Sèvres Extraordinaire! curator Charlotte Vignon. Shechet’s 2024 exhibition, Girl Group, at Storm King, featured six monumental outdoor works as well as an indoor museum exhibition that garnered universal praise. The artist is known for her experiments with materials, form, and motion and has explored three hundred years of ceramic history through her art and many curatorial projects. In 2016 Shechet curated with Vignon an exhibition at the Frick Collection entitled Porcelain, No Simple Matter: Arlene Shechet and the Arnhold Collection, presenting works made during a residency at the Meissen factory along with eighteenth-century Meissen porcelain works from the Frick Collection. Shechet is working on a forthcoming Frick Collection Diptych project featuring Sèvres’s Vase Japon.
Arlene Shechet is a sculptor known for her effortless combination of disparate elements 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. 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.
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, 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, 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.
Photo credit: Arlene Shechet, Asian Vase (Red Onion), 2013. Partially glazed porcelain with underglaze, overglaze enamel, platinum, and gold, 11 3/4 × 8 1/2 × 2 5/8 inches. Courtesy Arlene Shechet. Photo: Jason Wyche.
Date & Time
Wed, Sep 10, 2025 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Venue Details
Bard Graduate Center
38 West 86th StreetNew York, New York 10024
