Arlene Shechet (b. 1951, New York, United States) is an American sculptor whose interdisciplinary practice explores sculpture’s material, formal, and historical possibilities through ceramics, painting, drawing, and installation. Known for gravity-defying compositions, she creates works that challenge distinctions between abstraction and figuration, monumentality and fragility, craft and fine art, combining hand-built and industrial processes and embracing improvisation and transformation as central formal elements. She is widely credited with helping reinvigorate the role of ceramics within contemporary art.
Shechet received a BA from New York University and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her practice draws on a wide range of artistic, historical, and cultural references, producing sculptures marked by unexpected juxtapositions of texture, colour, scale, and form — simultaneously precarious and balanced.
She has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions, including presentations at Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, USA, 2015); The Frick Collection (New York, USA, 2016–17); Madison Square Park (New York, USA, 2018); and Storm King Art Center (Mountainville, USA, 2024), her largest outdoor installation to date. She has also developed a curatorial practice placing her work in dialogue with historical collections at The Frick Collection (New York, USA), The Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C., USA), Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, USA), and The Drawing Center (New York, USA).
Her work is held in major public collections including Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA); Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, USA); Centre Pompidou (Paris, France); National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C., USA); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, USA); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C., USA); Nasher Sculpture Center (Dallas, USA); Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, USA); and Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, USA). She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, an NEA Fellowship, and the College Art Association’s Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work, and was elected a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2023. She lives and works in New York City and the Hudson Valley.