{"id":89740,"date":"2025-10-21T22:39:14","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T22:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/89740\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T22:39:14","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T22:39:14","slug":"how-renegade-sculptor-judy-pfaff-made-a-career-breaking-the-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/89740\/","title":{"rendered":"How Renegade Sculptor Judy Pfaff Made a Career Breaking the Rules"},"content":{"rendered":"

Art<\/p>\n

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Portrait of Judy Pfaff in the studio, c. 1991. Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery. <\/p>\n

Judy Pfaff<\/a> thought she\u2019d be a painter. She graduated from Yale with an MFA in the discipline in 1973, but she was bored. \u201cPainters didn\u2019t interest me\u2014the way they talked about things,\u201d she told me when I met her in Tribeca, her old stomping grounds, ahead of the opening of her latest solo exhibition in New York. <\/p>\n

So she decided to teach herself sculpture instead, guided less by mentors than by curiosity. \u201cI kept buying these funny little books,\u201d she recalled, \u201clike 100 Experiments for the Scientist\u2014books for children about how to do things.\u201d The artist said it reminded her of Mr. Wizard, the TV scientist who turned household experiments into wonder.<\/p>\n

When Pfaff moved to a loft on Canal Street in the mid-1970s, she brought that DIY impulse with her. She raided neighborhood hardware stores for wire, plastics, and whatever else caught her eye, conducting experiments of her own. What began as tinkering became a method: She treated each material as a hypothesis about what sculpture could be. Even today, Pfaff\u2019s Hudson Valley studio is a riot of eclectic materials, exploding with colors and industrial scraps that she transforms into maximalist sculptures and installations.<\/p>\n

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Judy Pfaff, installation view of \u201cLight Years\u201d at Cristin Tierney Gallery in Tribeca, 2025. Photo by Adam Reich. Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery.<\/p>\n

Pfaff, now 79, has become one of America\u2019s most highly regarded sculptors: a MacArthur fellow in 2004, member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2009, and winner of the International Sculpture Center<\/a>\u2019s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. But even with all these accolades, she continues to experiment. <\/p>\n

Her latest fixation is neon. Soft, multicolored lights are embedded throughout her new exhibition, \u201cLight Years<\/a>,\u201d on view at Cristin Tierney<\/a> in New York through December 20th. The show is her first with the gallery after it began representing her earlier this year, and the first at the gallery\u2019s new space in Tribeca. It features 10 new wall panels, several new wall-mounted sculptures featuring neon, and a monumental sculpture, Travels to Bisnegar (2025), in which a recycled plastic carpet cascades across the wall, hung with fake flowers and shot through with fluorescent neon rods. It\u2019s a bold, luminous turn for an artist who has spent her career pushing color and form into new dimensions.<\/p>\n

Early years in New York<\/p>\n

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Judy Pfaff, Travels to Bisnegar, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery.<\/p>\n

After finishing at Yale, Pfaff drove down from New Haven to New York in her truck with her dog. She landed in SoHo, finding a 3,000-square-foot place on Canal in a matter of days for $150 a month. Studying painting at Yale had left much to be desired: \u201cYou think you\u2019re going to be with brilliant artists. You\u2019re going to have brilliant conversations. Ideas would be just rampant. It was one of the more boring [experiences],\u201d she said, specifically noting that the faculty didn\u2019t give students the time of day. Living in New York became the education she hoped her graduate program would be\u2014a place where she could invent her own way of working.<\/p>\n

Pfaff found herself drawn to the expressive work of performance artists like Yvonne Rainer<\/a>, Trisha Brown<\/a>, and Laurie Anderson<\/a>. During this time, she also formed a lifelong friendship with the abstract painter Al Held<\/a>, who had been her instructor at Yale. \u201cHe and I were very close\u2014until the day he died, actually,\u201d she said. \u201cWe sparred all the time about art and things.\u201d Held gave Pfaff her first big break, selecting her for a show at the alternative art hub Artists Space just a year after she arrived in the city. The following year, in 1975, she was included in the Whitney Biennial.<\/p>\n

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Judy Pfaff, Firefighter, 2025. Courtesy of the artist Cristin Tierney Gallery.<\/p>\n

Judy Pfaff, Azul Cielo, 2025. Courtesy of the aritst and Cristin Tierney Gallery.<\/p>\n

Held also introduced Pfaff to famed dealer Holly Solomon, who began showing Pfaff\u2019s work in 1979. \u201cHolly was a little bit like working for Madonna,\u201d Pfaff said, laughing. \u201cShe was \u00fcber-glamorous. Fun was everything.\u201d Through Solomon, Pfaff found herself in the company of \u201cgraffiti kids\u201d and \u201cmischief makers,\u201d as she called them, such as comic book artist Christopher Knowles<\/a> and downtown experimentalist Gordon Matta-Clark<\/a>. This rebellious community pushed Pfaff to expand her ideas about artmaking.<\/p>\n

By the early 1980s, Pfaff was creating vast, immersive environments comprising bright colors and frenetically placed materials. For instance, in 1980, Holly Solomon staged Pfaff\u2019s Deep Water, an installation that filled the entire gallery with tangled strands of wicker, tree branches, rattan, and wire mesh\u2014like a Wassily Kandinsky<\/a> composition spilling into space, emerging as a three-dimensional lyrical abstraction. \u201cI was doing stuff that was unbelievably not sellable,\u201d Pfaff said. \u201cAnd I remember Holly once saying, \u2018If I can sell this shit, I will be a great dealer.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Forging a career from fragments<\/p>\n

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Judy Pfaff, installation view of \u201cLight Years\u201d at Cristin Tierney Gallery in Tribeca, 2025. Photo by Adam Reich. Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery.<\/p>\n

Pfaff never stopped innovating. She quickly expanded her practice across wall-based constructions and immersive, site-specific installations combining industrial and organic materials. In the early stage of her career, she mounted such installations throughout the United States, from California State University to Gladstone Gallery in New York. Her work was featured again at the Whitney<\/a> in 1981. The sheer scale and daring materiality of her work won critical acclaim and accolades, including a Guggenheim<\/a> fellowship in 1983.<\/p>\n

Around this time, Pfaff worked in Brooklyn, where she found beauty in the city\u2019s wreckage: Burned-out furniture, twisted metal, and storm-tossed debris became raw material. Once, a 40-foot sign ripped loose by the wind found its way into her work. Though made from industrial parts, these works never forfeited color. \u201cWhen artists work in black and white, it\u2019s like you cut off 50 percent of what was open for you to do,\u201d she noted.<\/p>\n

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Judy Pfaff, installation view of \u201cLight Years\u201d at Cristin Tierney Gallery in Tribeca, 2025. Photo by Adam Reich. Courtesy of Cristin Tierney Gallery.<\/p>\n

The chaotic nature of her work was often reflected in her mindset, but the universe often provided solutions. \u201cSometimes I\u2019d be in tears, wondering how to fix it,\u201d she said. \u201cThen I\u2019d walk out on the sidewalk, and the answer would be tumbling around.\u201d<\/p>\n

One noteworthy example of such cosmic timing came in 1994. After completing Cirque, Cirque (1995), a massive commission for the Pennsylvania Convention Center, she realized she had forgotten an upcoming show at Brandeis University\u201410 days away. Driving north in a snowstorm with a truck full of welding gear and fiberglass, she arrived at an empty, ice-slicked campus. Then, as if on cue, a tree collapsed into a nearby creek, its roots perfectly exposed. \u201cThat was it,\u201d she recalled. \u201cWe started with that.\u201d The piece, elephant (1995) was improvised into existence.<\/p>\n

Judy Pfaff, in a new light<\/p>\n

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Judy Pfaff, finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery.<\/p>\n

Five decades into her career, Pfaff remains as restless and inventive as ever. A few years ago, while working on some chandelier pieces, Pfaff turned to neon\u2014a material she had previously avoided because of its cost and fragility. But after a friend introduced her to neon artist Joe Upham, she became obsessed. She eventually invited Upham to set up a workspace in her studio, where he began producing the glowing forms that soon became integral to her installations. Pfaff sees neon as a sort of counterbalance to her loose, intuitive methods. \u201cNeon artists are very tight,\u201d she said with a laugh. \u201cI\u2019m not that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Headshot of Judy Pfaff. 2023. Photo by Peter Aaron. Courtesy the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.<\/p>\n

Judy Pfaff, CARPETRIGHT, 2025. Courtesy the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.<\/p>\n

At Cristin Tierney, these experiments culminate in the new neon-embedded wall works, particularly Travels to Bisnegar, which feels alive\u2014like a rippling flying carpet, weaving in and out of multicolored neon spokes. Also on view are Pfaff\u2019s new colorful vertical panels, finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions (2025), which consist of acrylic and poured resin, some of which are adorned with recycled umbrellas and foam. This is a continuation of works shown in \u201cA Walk in the Park<\/a>,\u201d Pfaff\u2019s 2024 solo show at Atlanta\u2019s Johnson Lowe Gallery<\/a>, but this time, the artist integrates neon rods that slice through the panels\u2019 surfaces. <\/p>\n

Though her work has often been described as \u201chappy\u201d or \u201cupbeat,\u201d Pfaff calls these new panels \u201cmore sober\u201d\u2014earthier in palette, less exuberant in tone. But this sobriety still emerges in energetic form. Each wall work is streaked with light and texture, recalling both stained glass<\/a> and Abstract Expressionist <\/a>canvases. Pfaff\u2019s new body of work reaffirms her restless drive to test how far color, light, and matter can go.<\/p>\n

MR<\/p>\n

\"MR\"<\/p>\n

Maxwell Rabb<\/p>\n

Maxwell Rabb (Max) is a writer. Before joining Artsy in October 2023, he obtained an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from the University of Georgia. Outside of Artsy, his bylines include the Washington Post, i-D, and the Chicago Reader. He lives in New York City, by way of Atlanta, New Orleans, and Chicago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Art Portrait of Judy Pfaff in the studio, c. 1991. Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":89741,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[19359,437,434,435,436,60925,438,146,85,46,60924,22410],"class_list":{"0":"post-89740","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-artist-profiles","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-artsdesign","13":"tag-cristin-tierney","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-il","17":"tag-israel","18":"tag-judy-pfaff","19":"tag-maxwell-rabb"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}