Blog Posts by Subject: Sculpture

Black Women Artists: Augusta Savage

Katherine Ellington, a New York City medical humanities scholar and researcher, discusses the work and legacy of legendary artist Augusta Savage.

Meet the Artist: Tony Jannetti

We're really "branching" out into new forms of art at Mulberry Street Library with our latest exhibition by neighborhood artist Tony Jannetti. "The Not-Seen Ubiquitous - Visual Works by Tony Jannetti" is on view at Mulberry Street branch through October 31, 2015.

Meet the Artist: Evan Chamberlain

On view at the Mulberry Street Library are two glass works by Brooklyn-based artist Evan Chamberlain.

Tell Me More: How Can I Find Out About This Sculpture?

A recent question at the reference desk was how to find more about the sculpture of the large button threaded with a needle that stands in the Garment District of New York City at 7th Avenue and 39th Street. This query reminded me of a previous

Meet Local Artist Anne Stanner

The Bear by Anne StannerIn her January/February exhibit at the Ottendorfer Branch longtime Lower East Side resident and artist Anne Stanner showcases some of her sculptures which were created from recycled scrap metals. You can view three of her pieces here (The Bear, Horses and Antelope, and The Bull) from her series "Dreams of Lascaux."  You can view the rest of her exhibit on the first floor of the branch until the end of February.  I sat 

Heist Society: A Review

Katarina Bishop grew up all over Europe, but she isn’t an heiress. She has a Faberge egg, but she isn’t a Romanov. Kat is used to looking at a room and seeing all the angles, but that was before she stole a whole other life at the Colgan School only to walk away from it months later without a trace.

That was before everything went sideways.

While Kat was busy trying to steal a new, legit, life the family business prospered. When a powerful mobster’s priceless art collection goes missing it isn’t all that surprising that 

Princess Academy: A Review

Fourteen-year-old Miri wants a lot of things. She wants to be useful to her family. She wants to be taller and stronger. She wants desperately to work in the quarry and understand quarry speak the way everyone else on Mount Eskel does.

What Miri doesn’t want is to be a princess. At least, she doesn’t think she does.

There isn’t much room on Mount Eskel for princesses anyway. The mountain landscape is as beautiful as the linder stone the villagers mine for their livelihood but life there is hard. Lowland traders come to buy the mined linder, but 

A Paper Sculpted Goldfish.

Included among the books I brought out for last month's Handmade Crafternoon was one that I've been slow to return to the shelves because I want to try my hand at so many projects within it. The book in question is Kenneth Ody's Paper Folding and Paper Sculpture, and I'm a fan because it contains a really broad range of projects--from cute little projects like dog scuptures to some seriously elegant lacy paper 

A Book Arts Booklist.

If you were one of the nearly 80 crafty book artists-in-training who came out for Handmade Crafternoon last weekend, thanks for joining us as we folded and glued and cut our way to unusual pop-up paper garland book structures.  And speaking of books, a number of guests asked about getting a list of the Library books I brought along for browsing that day.  Your wish is my command.  Here are the titles I gathered to inspire us; each title links to its record in the

The Cinderella of Sculpture.

(Yes, it's made of soap. From Lester Gaba's On Soap Sculpture.) I first came upon the subject heading soap sculpture in the Library Catalog a couple of weeks ago, and I just had to investigate. And what I found more than confirmed my love of the serendipitous nature of research.

I learned-—in looking through a few books on the subject as well as 

Keith Haring Balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade

Debuting at this years Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade will be a 48-foot tall balloon titled Figure with Heart by the late artist Keith Haring. The balloon is based on Haring's ink on paper drawing, Untitled (Figure with Heart), 1987 and will be part of the Macy's Parade's Blue Sky Gallery series, which aims to "inject contemporary art into a pop culture phenomenon". (

Takashi Murakami @ the Brooklyn Museum

If you like Japanese anime and manga you should see the new © Murakami exhibition (April 5-July 13, 2008) at the Brooklyn Museum. This is the first major retrospective on the works of Japanese artist/designer Takashi Murakami, who is known as the Warhol of Japan. It focuses on his work from 1991-2000, “when the artist began exploring his own reality through an investigation of branding and identity." From "© MURAKAMI: Brooklyn Museum Photo Gallery”

The colors are vibrant 

Statues in Britain are Revolting!!

I came across an interesting article in the Art Newspaper titled “Statues in Britain are revolting—and so are we: The British art world has had enough of “Frankenstein monster memorials”.” (2.7.08, issue 188) It discusses the backlash or “fightback against “bad” public sculpture in the UK” toward the “unprecedented number of tasteless statues that have appeared across the country.” The editor of The Burlington 

A Shark at the Met?

Walking into the Modern Art wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I came across what I thought was a shark tank. For a second I had to step back thinking I entered the American Museum of Natural History by mistake.

But what I encountered was “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” by English artist Damien Hirst. A tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde encased in a glass cabinet.

“Hirst created work that brought together 

Guerrilla Artists Benched?

According to an AM New York article “Guerilla artists don’t want bench back“, an 8-foot-tall bench mysteriously appeared on Houston Street about two weeks ago. It goes on to say, “All this work, once it’s installed, it’s kind of just left to the fates,” said Tod Seelie, who collaborated with street artist Brad Downey on the bench and photographed its stealth installation in the middle of the night. “The idea is to see how time changes it.”

It would 

Everything Old is New Again

Would you want a commemorative figurine of Norman Mailer or Germaine Greer? Would Tom Wolfe look good fired in clay?

Our postmodern era has banished the time-honored desire for such celebratory decorative arts. The ancient Romans placed busts of their ancestors in household shrines. The Enlightenment era saw the rise of the great English and European potteries that produced commemorative likenesses of monarchs and generals.

The Romantic Revolution, however, instigated a real demand for such objects with its celebration of the cult of the individual. Bonaparte and Beethoven 

Richard Serra at MoMA

Did you visit the Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years exhibition at MoMA? The museum’s website continues to offer the exhibition in audio and video. Most of show’s audio was Richard Serra’s voice supplying histories of the process of the art.

Starting on the sixth floor I was captured by the choice of the first piece overhead. Look up or you miss it and I think some did miss it: a huge steel plate imbedded in the ceiling. Further on, the materials such as vulcanized found doors evoked a lost industrial New