User:Kimles/sandbox/UrsulaVonR

Ursula von Rydingsvard is a contemporary artist who creates distinctive, often large scale sculptures of wood, bronze, and other materials that are installed and exhibited globally in museums, galleries, sculpture parks, and public spaces. Often beginning with milled cedar, not unlike a “blank canvas,” she dips into an arena of the psychological and emotional. von Rydingsvard explains this approach: "If I were to say how it is that I break the convention of sculpture (and I'm not sure that's what I do or even if that's what I want to do), it would be by climbing into the work in a way that’s highly personal, that I can claim as being mine. The more mine it is, the more I’m able to break the convention." Through close observation and with poetic urgency, she creates abstract forms that invoke the body, landscape, language, vernacular architecture, spoons, shovels, and other common artifacts.

Her sculpture has features of the hands and mind of a seasoned builder, as well as a sophisticated artist. The work emerges from contradictory processes of labor – destructive and constructive, fractured and mended, decomposed and recomposed. von Rydingsvard’s work is a space where compelling contemporary ideas and searing memories coexist. She cuts away at the surfaces of cedar beams unleashing and discovering a deep, natural character. These nearly broken elements are arranged and bonded together in evocative forms. The processes of doing, undoing, and redoing over extended periods of time reenacts the slow, often painful emergence of palpable ideas through memory and speculation. At once familiar and enigmatic, her energetic and restive forms have established a particular and defining presence in the contemporary art world. Her studio is in Brooklyn, New York and she lives in New York City.

Early life and education

Born in Deensen, Germany in 1942 to a Polish mother and Ukrainian father, as a young child the artist and her six siblings experienced the German occupation of Poland and the trauma of World War II, followed by five years in eight different German refugee camps for displaced Poles. In 1959, through the U.S. Marshall Plan and with the assistance of Catholic agencies, her family of peasant farmers boarded a ship to the United States where they eventually settled in Plainville, Connecticut. She received a BA and MA from University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida in 1965 and an MFA from Columbia University in New York City in 1975.

Career

Vivid experiences of displacement and poverty as a child have inspired a constitutive resourcefulness. Following time in Miami, Florida, Berkeley, California, and New Britain, Connecticut as both a practicing artist and art educator, in 1973 von Rydingsvard moved to New York City as a single parent with young daughter Ursula Anne. She began the MFA program at Columbia and participated in the vibrant New York art world of the 1970s while studying art history, museum exhibitions, and indigenous and vernacular art. In 1975, she received a Fulbright-­‐Hayes Grant to travel to Poland (an enduring influence for the artist) but had to defer the trip due to the country’s political instability and travel restrictions. At this same time, she first began to use common units of milled cedar to create formally and conceptually complex sculpture. Formed by the ubiquitous conventions of the construction industry, the generically consistent sizes and lengths of wood (like sheets of office paper or other commonly produced and sized materials) provided a predictable foundation for an exceptional range of nuanced, complex, and eccentric sculptural forms. She has been actively and continuously exhibiting work since the mid-­‐1970s. The artist is represented by Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, NY.

Notable exhibitions

• 2018 “Now, She,” Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• 2018 “The Contour of Feeling,” The Fabric Workshop & Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• 2015 “Ursula von Rydingsvard,” la Biennale di Venezia, Giardino della Marinaressa, Venice, Italy
• 2014 “Ursula von Rydingsvard,” Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, England
• 2011-12 “Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture 1991-2009,” SculptureCenter, Queens, New York; traveled to deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio; and to Frost Art Museum, Miami, Florida
• 2006 “Mad. Sq. Art: Ursula von Rydingsvard,” Mad Sq Art at Madison Square Park, New York, NY
• 1992-4 Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY (Ten-year retrospective)

Museum collections

• Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
• Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT
• Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY
• Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland
• Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH
• The Contemporary Austin, Austin, TX
• Crystal Bridges American Art Museum, Bentonville, AR
• De Cordova Sculpture Park + Museum, Lincoln, MA
• Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI
• High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
• Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, NH
• Madison Art Center, Madison, WI
• Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
• Museum of Modern Art New York, NY
• National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
• Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO
• North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC
• Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL
• San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA
• Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky
• Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY
• Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA
• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
• Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
• Williams College, Williamstown, MA
• Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

Awards and grants

• Visionary Woman Honors Award, Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, PA, 2017
• Lifetime Achievement Award, International Sculpture Center, Hamilton, NJ, 2014
• Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, 2011
• Best Show in a Non-Profit Gallery or Space, American Section of the International Association of Art Critics, 2011
• Rappaport Prize, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, 2008
• Order of the Cross, Polish Consulate, New York, 2008
• Mary Miss Resident in Visual Arts, American Academy in Rome, Italy, 2007
• Academy Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY, 1994
• Honorary Doctorate, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, 1991
• Individual Artists Grant, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C., 1986
• Athena Foundation Grant, Long Island City, NY, 1983
• Guggenheim Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, New York, NY, 1983
• Individual Artists Grant, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C., 1979
• Individual Artists Grant, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C., 1978
• Fulbright-Hayes Travel Grant, Washington, D.C., 1975

Bibliography

• Phillips, Patricia (2011). Ursula von Rydingsvard: Working. New York: Prestel Publishing. ISBN 3791350862.
• Von Rydingsvärd, Ursula, et al. The Sculpture of Ursula Von Rydingsvard. New York: Hudson Hills Press , 1996.