Sang-Ho, Shin (b. 1947)
Sang-Ho is an internationally renowned Korean ceramicist. He attained his BFA and MFA from the School of Ceramics, Hongik University, where he later became a professor, dean, and graduate director.
Sang-Ho No’s Dream of Africa (2006) is located to the west of Esther Lloyd Jones Hall.
- Korea's contemporary ceramic artists and a renowned kiln byMany artists in Korea are turning to a reinterpretation of traditional ceramic wares. The essence of punch'̆ong, a ceramic ware with an overall white slip, is being rediscovered by many artists, and its diversity is being further enriched based on each artist's unique personality. Shin Sang-ho, Yun Kwang-jo, and Yi Su-jong, three widely known artists in their early and mid fifties, stand out for their noteworthy contributions to punch'̆ong's modernization and have sparked its revival to such an extent that it now commands an important place in contemporary ceramic art. The writer examines the work of these artists in detail and discusses the Park Young-sook Kiln, one of Korea's most important and renowned ceramic kilns, where the country's traditional ceramic wares, including punch'̆ong, have been successfully re-created and further developed.
- Sang-ho Shin: LongHouse Reserve, East Hampton, New York byA review of an exhibition of work by Sang-ho Shin at LongHouse Reserve, East Hampton, New York. Shin's corroboration of ancient forms through his African inspiration is expressed mainly through ceramic sculptures of rams and horses. These primal figures establish a presence that can unsettle even the most casual observer into a confrontation with ancient values, practices, and images from Korea and Africa and perhaps from Native American culture.
- Contemporary Trends of Korea's Ceramic Arts byPart of a special section on Korean ceramics on the occasion of the World Ceramic Biennale in Gwangju, South Korea, in 2005. The writer discusses contemporary trends in South Korea's ceramic arts. During the 1960s and 1970s, South Korea's ceramic art experienced a boom in a wide variety of forms, ranging from traditional pottery with re-creations of Goryeo celadon and Joseon porcelain, to ceramic sculpture that combined pottery with sculpted art, to creative innovations applied to traditional ceramics. While artists such as Yoon Kwang-Cho and Shin Sang-ho show the intrinsic value of the whimsical and and nonconformist buncheongsagi of the Joseon period, Kim Suk-whan revives unglazed earthenware as a representative ceramic art form that conveys a unique Korean flavor. Kwon Soon-hyung and Kim Yik-yung are locating a new space for Joseon porcelain in contemporary life.
Romano, Salvatore M. (1925–2015)
Salvatore Romano was born on Sept. 12, 1925, in Cliffside, N.J. He served in the U.S. Navy in the 1940s.
He studied painting and drawing at the Art Students League in New York and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris during the 1950s.
He was a member of the Brata Gallery, a cooperative gallery in New York that included many artists involved with Minimalism.
In 1965 Romano was included in the iconic exhibition “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum. This show was followed by many others, including major installations — some involving water and kinetic elements — at the Sculpture Center in Manhattan, at the Brooklyn Bridge and at Socrates Sculpture Park, in Long Island City.
Exhibitions of his constructions in copper and brass were held at Rutgers University and at numerous galleries in New York City and Upstate New York.
In his artist’s statement, Romano said, “The theme of my work remains complexity and contradiction. My sculpture embodies the idea of change, of fluidity of motion on the one hand, and of minimal forms pushed to their essence, in some instances made transparent, in others impermeable bulk, but in every case serving as vehicles of movement and reflection.”
Romano was a sculpture professor at the City University of New York’s Lehman College for 30 years. He resided in Soho with his family since 1973.
For five decades his work has been exhibited in New York galleries in Soho and Chelsea, and his art has also been shown in Brazil and Italy.
During the 1970s Romano’s work grew to the ambitious scale and proportions found in the art of Minimalists Ronald Bladen and Tony Smith, among others (From Sal Romano (salromanoartist.com)).
Romano’s sculpture Aerated Rectangles (2004) is located near the northwest of Cannoneer Court.
Rosenthal, Tony (1914-2009)
Born August 9, 1914, in Highland Park, Illinois, Tony Rosenthal is best known for creating a staggering list of monumental public art sculpture in cities around the world. For over seven decades Tony Rosenthal created an arc of sculpture in a variety of sizes, styles and media, including wood, steel, bronze, brass, cement and aluminum.
Every day millions see, enjoy and interact with monumental public art created by Rosenthal in cities across America. In New York City alone, five Rosenthal public art sculptures have been beloved and visible 24/7 for over four decades, yet Rosenthal is not a household name. Art dealer Joseph K. Levene, President, Joseph K. Levene Fine Art, Ltd.told The New York Times, Tony Rosenthal "reminds me of a character actor. You know the face but not the name. With him, you know the art." (From https://www.tonyrosenthal.com/).
Rosenthal’s sculpture Untitled (Date unknown) is located south of East Building.
Tony Rosenthal Official Website
Tony Rosenthal, a Sculptor of Public Art, Dies at 94 - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Saliter, Karl
Karl Saliter is a sculptor and a writer, working primarily in steel rods and stone. His sculptures can be seen on permanent exhibit in LA, NY, and Chicago. When he is not practicing sculpture, Saliter is also a performance artist, gracing stages as varied as the Metropolitan Opera, the Boston Celtics, and The Humor Project. His performances deliver a combination of witty one liners and circus tricks. He has been performing full time internationally for 18 years (From FloridaAtlanticUniversity.com)
Saliter's sculpture Particle/Wave, Time/Space Continuum (2004) is located just north of the Juliana Curran Terian Design Center.
Siegel, Alan
Alan J Siegel began his study of art in Chicago with George Sotos and Mustafa Naguib which led to several sculpture commissions in bronze. After moving to New York City to attend the Art Students' League, Siegel put his artwork on hold and entered New York's restaurant industry, eventually becoming one of the most sought after Maitre D's in the Lincoln Center district. After a long hiatus away from his artwork he decided to pick up where he had left off and began sculpting again, producing a number of figure compositions based upon Jewish themes. Since moving to the Hudson Valley Siegel has expanded his sculptural technique and style in a more abstract direction and continues to draw from life at local workshops (From AlanSiegel.com).
Siegel’s sculpture Chair (1990) is located just south of South Hall.
Slemon, Seán
Seán Slemon is a South African artist from Cape Town, living and working in Brooklyn, New York since 2005. He is recognized for addressing socio-political issues pertaining to the commoditization and distribution of natural resources. His examination of how land, light and street trees are co-opted to create advantage or discriminate underscores the active and passive decisions we make as a society. The result is an intense interrogation of public vs. private property, its ownership, and the impact this distribution can have on people’s lives.
Formally trained in sculpture, Slemon now incorporates installation, drawing and photography, seeking media that reinforce the concept. Embedding materials such as chalk, soil and concrete help to build physical and ideological layers and create theoretical conflicts. He primarily builds and fabricates sculptures himself using gypsum, fiberglass and other materials; however, recent projects have employed other fabrication techniques, using 3D computer modeling and working with industrial fabricators to produce works on a larger and more complex scale.
Slemon obtained an MFA from Pratt Institute in New York and a BFA from Michaelis School of Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town. He has been featured in numerous publications, and completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, and Chashama in New York. He has been awarded grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in New York and the National Arts Council of South Africa; and won the 2005 Sasol New Signatures Award for emerging artists in South Africa.
Slemon’s work has been shown in the U.S., Europe and South Africa. Major site specific installations include Uplift: The Mountain (2008) at the Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena, and The Light at 7:00 am (2009) for No Longer Empty’s Reflecting Transformation show in Chelsea, NY. Most recently, Goods for Me (2011) was featured at Art Miami in the THINK BIG! show, curated by LaRete Art Projects.
In 2014 Slemon completed a commission for First National Bank; a series of five public sculptures for their Johannesburg Bank City precinct. More recent exhibitions were "Captured" with Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Seattle in 2016, and "Confluence" at Bethel University in 2017.
Seán Slemon is represented by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Seattle and Everard Read Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa (From http://www.seanslemon.com/ ).
Slemon’s sculpture Block 700 (2007) is located between the ISC Building and the Rose Garden
Smith, Leon (b. 1933)
Smith’s sculpture Red Cabinet (2004) is located west of DeKalb Hall. Smith’s sculpture Triangle (2004) is located between the ISC Building and the Rose Garden. And Smith’s sculpture Guardian (2001) is located just north of the Pratt Studios.
Snelson, Kenneth (1927-2016)
As a child in Pendleton, Oregon, Kenneth Snelson loved to build model airplanes and ships, activities that anticipated his success as a sculptor of carefully engineered steel and aluminum pieces that conveyed, in the artist’s words, “the wondrous essence of elementary structure.” After finishing high school, he enlisted in the United States Navy, working as a radio technician and in naval intelligence in Washington. Following his discharge, he took advantage of the GI Bill and enrolled at the University of Oregon, where he pursued architectural drawing and design.
In 1948, Snelson attended the summer session at Black Mountain College. Noting the young man’s “aptitude for three-dimensional design,” Josef Albers guided him toward the experimental architect and faculty member Buckminster Fuller. Initially, the two men’s relationship was very compatible, and Snelson recalled being “electrified” by Fuller’s first lecture. That fall, Snelson returned to study engineering at the University of Oregon and then returned to western North Carolina for a second summer. He brought with him a kinetic model of plywood pieces suspended one over another by nylon tension lines, a piece he called Early X Piece. At Fuller’s instigation, the design was translated into metal and christened “tensegrity”—a combination of integrity and tension—and subsequently exhibited as Fuller’s own work.
Snelson went on to attend the Institute of Design in Chicago, an American offshoot of the Bauhaus, but found it lacked the conviviality of that he had experienced at Black Mountain. For a short period, he studied in Paris with Fernand Léger, a noted modernist who often painted floating figures. Snelson settled in New York after that and worked for a time as a cinematographer for television documentaries, while continuing to make small sculptures. In 1964, he was commissioned to create a major aerial piece measuring thirty by thirty-five feet for the World’s Fair in New York.
Although his work was represented in important museum exhibitions (including the 1966 Sculpture Annual at the Whitney Museum of American Art), critics often accused Snelson of being more an engineer than an artist. He responded in turn: “Engineers make structures for specific uses, to support something, to hold something, to do something. My sculptures serve only to stand up by themselves, and to reveal a particular form such as a tower or a cantilever or a geometrical order probably never seen before.” He developed a specialty of airy public outdoor sculptures constructed of stainless steel and aluminum, which illustrate his theories of compression and tension. He held five United States patents, and in 1999 the International Sculpture Center presented him with the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award (From Kenneth Snelson :: The Johnson Collection, LLC)
Snelson’s sculpture Black E.C. Tower (2006) is located south of Myrtle Hall.
Soga, Takashi (b. 1952)
Takashi Soga was born in Osaka, Japan in 1952. He is a kinetic sculptor creating large scale, outdoor sculptures that respond to the air flow and gravitational pulls that the pieces are built in. He graduated from Osaka University of Art in 1975.
Soga has received a number of awards and honors, including the Grand Prize at the 13th International Art Exhibition in Japan in 1980, the Nagano Prize in 1998, and the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2005 (From Takashi Soga (2003) - Saltonstall).
Soga’s sculpture Silent Beam (2003) is located south west of the ISC Building.
- Takashi Soga: Meditations on Gravity. byPublication Date: 2007
Stewart, Dana L. (b. 1951)
Dana Stewart was born and raised in California, where he developed interests in art, animals, and surfing. He pursued an education in the arts and received a Master of Arts degree from San Diego State University. Early works were executed in ceramics, welded metals and other various materials. Accepting an invitation from the late Herk Van Tongeren, former president of the Johnson Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture, Stewart traveled to Hamilton, New Jersey, to research ceramic shell casting techniques. A scheduled short visit turned into permanent residency on the East Coast and an appointment in 1977 to head of the Johnson Atelier’s ceramic shell department. Ten years later, he became proprietor of Stewart Sculpture Casting in Lambertville, New Jersey. Stewart has exhibited regularly in New Jersey since 1987 at many venues which include The Museum of the City of Trenton in the Ellarslie Mansion, The Mason Gross School of Arts at Rutgers University, Mercer County Community College, and the 1860 House-Montgomery Cultural Center in Skillman (From Dana Stewart - Grounds For Sculpture).
Stewart’s sculpture Sitting on His Laurels (2000) is located south of the Engineering Building.
Sugarman, George (1912-1999)
George Sugarman was a prolific, controversial, and forward-thinking American artist. His sculptures, drawings, and paintings defy a definitive style. As an innovator in pedestal-free sculpture and vividly painted metal sculptures, Sugarman was continually expanding on the metamorphoses of his prodigious creativity.
Always interested in the well-being of dedicated, young, and developing artists, Sugarman provided for them in his will. Thus, the establishment of The George Sugarman Foundation, Inc.
“All art is metaphor, if one wants it that way, but then so is any object. To escape from metaphor, artists have often chosen other ways: sheer physical stimulation or the insistence on a system of formal relationships that has meaning in and for itself. Metaphor, stimulation, formal relationships, three ways to meaning. Is it necessary to choose?“
- George Sugarman, 1974
(From GeorgeSugarman.com)
Sugarman’s sculpture Bench (Date unknown) is located south of East Building.
Theel, Gunnar
Gunnar Theel has been exhibited and is represented in numerous collections—select shows include exhibitions at New Hope Arts, New Hope, PA; A New Leaf Gallery, Berkeley, CA; the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA; the Shanghai Spring Art Salon, Shanghai, China; The Madison Mile at The Hollycroft Foundation, Madison, CT; Pier Walk, Chicago, IL; ART/OMI, Omi, NY; Pratt Institute Sculpture Park, Brooklyn, NY; and Contemporary Sculpture at Chesterwood, Stockbridge, MA. His sculptures are in collections in America and Europe including the Museum of Modern Art in Jacksonville, FL (JMOMA); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Hall Financial Group, Dallas, TX; and Shanghai Krupp Stainless, Pudong, China, to name a few (From GroundsForSculpture.com).
Theel's sculpture Right Angles (Date unknown) is located to the east of Cannoneer Court.
Tyler, James
James Tyler’s Brickhead installations are unique colossal heads that invite us to identify with the world’s ceramic heritages. They bring today’s faces together with pre-Columbian, South American, Native American, Asian, African, and Western influences; yet they are clearly contemporary, relics of a civilization not yet past…The ponderous weight of the brick constructions is juxtaposed with the ethereal nature of time. At the same, the heads are stylized portraits of everyman and everywoman. They are unique yet universal. They are us.
For ancient peoples, colossal stone and clay heads, such as those created by the Toltec, Olmec and other cultures in central Mexico, often symbolized their connections with the spirits they worshiped, and these, in turn, often represented the elements, such as rain and sun, or other larger-than-life phenomena, such as death and love. Each culture created large heads to suit its own purposes. The Toltecs created large ceramic heads symbolizing their indigenous culture and values, yet scholars differ in their analyses of the origins and meanings of these works. Tyler’s easy way of replacing the gods with our own visages is, in a way, Socratic. Socrates insisted that the gods on Mount Olympus were only representations of a higher being. By choosing to represent all of humanity, the here and now that exists outside of cultural considerations, Tyler is having his own Socratic dialogue with pre-Columbian artists (Adapted from NüartGallery.com).
Tyler's sculpture Brickhead: Yemanga (2012) is located north of Esther Lloyd Jones Hall (ELJ).