For nearly 60 years, Joel Shapiro experimented with the basic properties of sculpture—scale, form, and mass—in an effort to bring three-dimensional objects, as he once remarked, “into the air.” Shapiro began his art career in New York City at the end of the 1960s alongside other artists working to push beyond the simple geometric forms, nonrepresentational content, and cool reserve of Minimalism to instead embrace play and narrative suggestion in their work. By the early 1980s, Shapiro had developed his signature sculptural language: rectangular volumes joined in ways that suggest figures leaning, balancing, or falling.
With the monumental, multipart sculpture ARK, made just before his death in June 2025, the artist brought his favored themes and geometries—cantilevers, rectilinear forms, and expressive colors and shapes—to new functions and scales. Brightly painted wooden blocks and beams project toward the center only to extend outward again. Each vantage point reveals new shapes and forms as well as new associations.
Organized by Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and Rachel Rosin, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints and Department of Curatorial Affairs.
