Dear Readers    

You’ve heard the one about how sculpture is something you bump into when backing up to look at a painting. An old boyfriend who was a sculptor told me that joke.

He also told me the story about how Louise Bourgeois was at a high power dinner with an all-male sculptor guest list, being wined and dined as prospective artists for a commission. When the job was described as for someone who really had balls, apparently Ms. Bourgeois stood up from the dinner table and shouted, “I got balls!” That story is always fun to tell and one hopes it’s true. The point being that sculpture was once a man’s game and arguably a secondary modern art form compared to painting.

A few years back we did an issue about painting. This time around, we decided to address sculpture. It turns out that sculpture is going strong. As somebody who has been known to dabble with a paint brush on occasion, I’m aware that there are two types of artists: those who work on a flat surface, and those who create 3D art. I was lousy at ceramics and sculpture but thrived with pen or paintbrush in hand. Is it the way we are wired? I think so, although some artists succeed at doing both. Take our cover artist, Aaron Curry. His sculpture is as manly as Richard Serra’s, and his paintings are just as accomplished—although the 2D works do take on a spherical quality with their shaped canvases and tubular, outer-space content (looking suspiciously sculptural).

Perhaps oddly, female sculptors outnumber males in this issue, but only by accident. Could it be because the ancient tools of the sculptor—hammer and chisel, welding torch, lost wax casting—are no longer necessary when sculpting (thereby not requiring the fair amount of brawn it used to require to perform such tasks)? Materials used in creating 3-dimensional objects these days include cardboard, yarn, fabric and found objects. Some are created on computers, far from the original meaning of sculpting: to carve.

Another medium gaining popularity is clay, also known as ceramics, and it can be very hands-on. Regular contributor Scarlet Cheng just scores the surface on clay sculpture today. She focuses on Matt Wedel, Tanya Batura, and Phyllis Green, who has been working with the mud substance for decades now. Teapots, ashtrays and bongs have been cast aside for busts, flower trees and larger-than-life objects. Kilns are heating up.

But can it be classified as sculpture? Art critic/professor Frances Colpitt questions this in her article on the death of sculpture. She is inspired to continue the conversation with the late Donald Judd from his famous 1965 essay, “Specific Objects,”  on the topic.

When you get right down to it, it’s all just art. And I have bumped into it when I was backing up to look at a painting.