FUNCTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS: ARTIST-MADE FURNITURE

Scott Bluedorn is an artist, illustrator and designer working in various media including painting, drawing, print process, installation and found object assemblage.  His work engages with the intersection of human culture and the natural world in the anthropocene era defined by climate change and the alteration of environments by human agency, while incorporating elements of science, myth, mysticism and the supernatural. Scott lives and works on eastern Long Island, and work is in the collection of the Parrish Art Museum of Watermill, NY, Edward Albee Foundation, and numerous private collections.

Photo by Linda Alpern

John Chamberlain (1927 – 2011) was born in Rochester, Indiana. In 1931 he moved to Chicago with his mother after the divorce of his parents. He would spend most of his childhood there, until, at 16 he joined the U. S. Navy, serving for three years aboard an aircraft carrier. Later, Chamberlain attended the Art Institute of Chicago on the G.I. Bill and, in 1955 he entered Black Mountain College where he studied with the poets Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan. The experience would galvanize his interest in language, an intrinsic part of his aesthetic. In 1956 he moved to New York and soon created his first sculpture made from automobile body parts, titled Shortstop.

Chamberlain’s art would achieve critical acclaim by the early 1960s, placing him at the forefront of the American vanguard as he intuited the gestural force of Abstract Expressionism in three- dimensions. Chamberlain’s work from this period also touched on the industrial ethos of Minimalism and the ready-made spirit of Pop Art, conjoining the three movements in a single, elastic oeuvre. He often said of his process, “it’s all in the fit,” and his intent to finding the right “fit” remained consistent through explorations of materials ranging from galvanized steel, urethane foam, mineral-coated Plexiglas, and tin foil as well as major works in filmmaking, photography, and printmaking.

Over the six-decades of his prolific career, Chamberlain established studios in New York, New Mexico, California, Connecticut, and Florida, where he maintained an 18,000 square-foot studio in Sarasota. On Long Island’s east end, where he lived and worked from 1991 to his death in 2011, he established a massive studio and archive located on Shelter Island.

John Chamberlain has been the focus of three major retrospectives including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1971 and 2012, respectively, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1986, for which the publication, John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture 1954–1985, was produced. He has received numerous honors including the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, ME, and the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture from the International Sculpture Center, Washington, D.C., both in 1993; Gold Medal from the National Arts Club, 1997 and Distinction in Sculpture Honour from the Sculpture Center in 1999, both in New York; Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guild Hall Academy, East Hampton, NY; and a Doctor of Fine Arts, Honoris Causa from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI. His art is represented in esteemed museum collections across five continents.

Quentin Curry (b. 1972, Johnstown, PA) is a contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, and photography. He studied at Bard College and the San Francisco Art Institute before living and working in New York City for over a decade. Curry’s work emphasizes materiality, surface, and process, drawing from both natural and cultural influences. His art explores time, consciousness, and human experience, examining how these elements shape our understanding of the world. With a focus on both tangible and intangible dimensions of life, Curry’s practice often blurs the boundaries between the organic and artificial.

Curry’s sculptural works, particularly his rock-like forms, create a dynamic tension between primitivism and industrial pragmatism. These pieces merge organic shapes with mechanical structure, reflecting his interest in how human intervention reshapes the natural environment. By blending nature’s inherent forms with manufactured elements, Curry’s sculptures evoke both primal and contemporary sensibilities, inviting reflection on the evolving relationship between nature and industry.

Curry’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles and participation in the Second Biennial of the Canary Islands in Spain. His work is held in prominent private collections, including the Hort and Saatchi collections.

Image courtesy of the artist. 

Peter Dayton (b. 1955, New York) attended art schools in Europe in the 1970s and graduated in 1979 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he studied visual, video, and performance art. Initially he pursued music as an art project, then became a professional musician, first in the punk rock band Le Peste, then under his own name until 1986. He turned his attention back to visual art in 1988. Dayton’s work often references various art historical movements and concepts such as minimalism, pop art, abstract expressionism, and feminism. He simultaneously explores and critiques commodity culture and art historical movements through varied materials, techniques, and presentations.

Dayton has participated in solo and group exhibitions nationally, internationally, and extensively on the East End of Long Island. He has produced numerous site-specific installations and commissions for Louis Vuitton, Chanel, the Peter Marino Art Foundation, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Guild Hall, to name a few.

Dayton lives and works in East Hampton, New York.

peterdayton.com

Photo: Lindsey Morris

Born in 1925 and bred in Fowler, Colorado, a small farming community surrounded by flat, wide prairies and a distant view of the Rockies, Connie Fox received her BFA in 1947 at Un. of CO, and afterwards attended Art Center School, LA for a rigorous program of drawing, perspective, rendering, and composition. She received her MA at the Un. of NM, Albuquerque in 1952, where she then taught and met artists Elaine de Kooning (1918-1989) and Robert Dash (1931-2013).

Connie’s work was shown in the 1950s through the 1970s in Albuquerque, San Francisco, the Richmond Museum of Art, and in Manhattan at the “Tenth Street” type Camino Gallery, FAR, and later at Ingber Gallery and Brenda Taylor Gallery.

Connie’s works are included in the collections of many major museums across the country, including the Brooklyn Museum; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; the Parrish Art Museum and Guild Hall, as well as National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC; the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the University of Florida, Gainesville.

Her Sammy’s Beach series, painted between 2007-2014, formed the body of work in her most recent solo exhibitions with Danese/Corey Gallery, NY and the Heckscher Museum. Fox originally created the pieces in this exhibition for The Home Show, Vered Gallery, 1989, a show of artful furniture designed collaboratively by Connie Fox and William King, sculptor. King said of this show, "It's all functional." Fox gave it the subtitle "What a Girl from Colorado Thought Paris Looked Like in the 1920's".

Fox’s paintings can be set in context with, but were also freed by Abstraction, yet she defies the Abstract Expressionist tag, old or new, and has been described as a “modern classicist” whose paint gestures and compositional elements are part of a “comprehensive formal vocabulary.” She herself spoke of her affinity with the European Surrealists, not just in art, but also in the use of visual imagery as in the avant-garde films of Cocteau and Fellini, to which she was exposed as a student at the Art Center School in LA. 

Having started her family in New Mexico and Berkeley, California, she went east as far as Pittsburgh in the 1970’s and then, on the encouragement of Elaine de Kooning, she established her home and studio in East Hampton, NY in 1979. A foray into larger and larger paintings spanned the 80’s and 90’s and into the first ten years of the 21st century, once she built her new studio not far from Elaine’s home and studio, and Sammy’s Beach. Throughout these decades Fox progressively created her own artistic identity as a painter. “I can relate anything to anything,” she said, in relation to her use of composition, texture, and surreal images. “I’m more interested in what things do than what they are,” said Fox. 

Amei Wallach wrote, Fox was “a super collider of painting…[who] accelerates particles of line, shape, dimension, improbable hue…into emanations of energy. The integrity and sheer exuberance of her life in art is exemplary and it is rare.”

Connie Fox and her husband, sculptor William King, made their home together and worked in the studios they built in East Hampton’s Northwest Woods through the last 40 years of Fox’s life. Both Connie and William were honored as inductees in the Hamptons Fine Art Fair 2024 Hall of Fame last summer.

Photo: Marc Veit Schwaer
Image courtesy of Megan Chaskey

Born 1979 Louisville, KY
Lives and works in Bridgehampton NY

Kurt Gumaer explores the intersection of function and form through sculptural works that reference furniture and architectural elements. Using wood, concrete, and salvaged construction materials, he constructs objects that suggest utility—benches climb walls, modular units come apart, and forms resist straightforward classification. Rooted in a sensitivity to material and site, Gumaer’s practice draws from both the natural world and the built environment. His work invites viewers to reconsider their relationship to space, structure, and the boundaries between design, sculpture, and installation.

Mary Heilmann was born in 1940 in San Francisco, California. She earned a BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1962), and an MA from the University of California, Berkeley (1967). She moved to New York the following year, in 1968. Since then, Heilmann’s work has appeared in three Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1972, 1989, 2008) and is included in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco MOMA, National Gallery of Art, the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, Netherlands, and the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2017), was a United States Artists Oliver Fellow (2014), has received the Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation Award (2006) and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Mary Heilmann: Starry Night an early body of sculptural work is currently on exhibit at Dia Beacon NY. In April an installation, Mary Heilmann: Long Line, debuted at the Whitney Museum offering a social space environment with a large mural and seating by the artist. In the fall Mary Heilmann: Works on Paper, 1973-2019 will be published with an essay by art historian Jo Applin and a personal reflection by artist Ilana Savdie. 

Mary Heilmann lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York and New York City.

maryheilmann.com

Photo: Jo Ann Comfort

Julian Schnabel’s work has been exhibited all over the world.  His paintings, sculptures, and works on paper have been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1982; The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1982; Tate Gallery, London, 1982; Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1987; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, 1987; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1987; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1987; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 1987; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1987; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes, 1989; Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, 1989; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1989; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 1989; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1989; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Monterrey, 1994; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 1995; Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Bologna, 1996; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/Main, 2004; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2004; Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma, Helsinki, 2008;  Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, 2009; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 2010; Museo Correr, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 2011; The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, 2013; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, 2014; Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2014; NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, 2014; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, 2016; Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco, 2018; and Hall Art Foundation, Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg, 2017, 2022 and 2023.

Schnabel, an award-winning film director, has written and directed seven feature films. In 1995, Schnabel wrote and directed his first feature film, Basquiat, about fellow New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The film was released in 1996 and was in the official selection of the Venice Film Festival the same year. Schnabel’s second film, Before Night Falls, based on the life of the late exiled Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 Venice Film Festival and Javier Bardem won the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor. Javier Bardem was also nominated for Best Actor at the 2001 Academy Awards. In 2007 Schnabel directed his third film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  Schnabel received the award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival as well as Best Director at the Golden Globe Awards, where the film won Best Foreign Language Film.  The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Director. The film was also nominated for seven 2008 César Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Actor for which Mathieu Amalric won for his portrayal of Jean-Dominque Bauby.  In 2007, he also made a film of Lou Reed’s Berlin concert at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.  Miral, won the UNESCO as well as the UNICEF award at the 2010 Venice Film Festival.  Miral was shown at the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations.  At Eternity’s Gate (2018), a film about Vincent Van Gogh starring Willem Dafoe had its world premiere at the 2018 Venice Film Festival and was nominated for the Golden Lion Award. Dafoe won the Coppa Volpi at the 2018 Venice Film Festival and was nominated for Best Actor at the Golden Globes and 2019 Academy Awards. Schnabel has recently completed his seventh feature film, In the Hand of Dante, a film adaptation of Nick Tosches’s third novel of the same name, starring Oscar Isaac as well as Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Jason Momoa, Al Pacino, and Martin Scorsese. In the Hand of Dante will be released in the 2024/2025 season.

His work is in numerous museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; Tate Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Fondation Musée d’Art Moderne, Luxembourg;  Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Hall Art Foundation.

julianschnabel.com

Julian Schnabel. Photo: Louise Kugelberg, 2016

Karen Simon (b. 1956, New York) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer whose work explores the tension between natural and industrial materials. A graduate of Parsons School of Design (BFA, 1979), Simon began her practice in wood sculpture, later integrating metal to create dynamic forms that investigate contrast, duality, and balance. Driven by a commitment to continual growth, Simon regularly embraces new techniques and technologies to expand her artistic language. Most recently, she has incorporated LED light into her work, using shifting illumination to animate her sculptures and introduce a temporal, experiential dimension.

Her installations have been commissioned for Ellis Island, the Japanese American National Museum, and Union Station in Washington, D.C. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Library of Congress, and the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

karensimon.com
@karensimon_art

Image courtesy of the artist. 

Elizabeth de Cuevas (1929–2023), known professionally as Strong-Cuevas, was an American sculptor, born in France, who spent her early life in Paris, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Florence, and New York City. After studying at Vassar, the Sorbonne, Sarah Lawrence, and Columbia, she turned to sculpture in the 1960s, studying at the Art Students League of New York with John Hovannes. She began by carving in wood and stone and later created pieces primarily in wax and plaster, which were cast in bronze or stainless steel.  She also created works for fabrication in stainless steel or aluminum, as well as many drawings.  Her work is emotional, psychological, meditative, and aspirational, exploring movement, positive and negative space, the inner life of the mind, and the cosmos.

Strong-Cuevas had two solo exhibitions at Guild Hall (1980 and 2012) and participated in many group shows there. Her work has been exhibited at the Southampton Arts Center, Park Avenue Armory, and Grounds for Sculpture, which holds several of her monumental works. Her work is in the permanent collections of Guild Hall, the Bruce Museum, and the Heckscher Museum of Art, among others.

Image courtesy of Deborah Carmichael

MARK WILLIAM WILSON was born in Tamworth NSW Australia in 1959. He had his first solo show at the Alcolea Gallery in Barcelona Spain in 1988. This was followed by shows at Fawbush Gallery in 1989 and Shafrazi Gallery in 1990 in New York City.

For the next 30 years he exhibited in Madrid, Paris, Stockholm, Los Angeles, Sydney Australia, and the East End of Long Island where he has lived full-time since 2007.

In 1992 he was awarded a Pollack-Krasner Foundation grant, and in 2019 exhibited his paintings at the Parrish Museum in Southampton. Other recent exhibitions include The Biology of Light at the Clinton Academy (2022), Seaworthy at the Maritime Museum (2023), Heaven and Earth at Lucore Art, Montauk (2024), and I Say Potato at the Bridgehampton Museum (2025).

Image courtesy of the artist. 

The New York Times described Robert Wilson as “a towering figure in the world of experimental theater and an explorer in the uses of time and space on stage. Transcending theatrical convention, he draws in other performance and graphic arts, which coalesce into an integrated tapestry of images and sounds.” Susan Sontag has said of Wilson’s work, “it has the signature of a major artistic creation. I can’t think of any body of work as large or as influential.”

Born in Waco, Texas, Wilson was educated at the University of Texas and Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, where he took an interest in architecture and design. He studied painting with George McNeil in Paris and later worked with the architect Paolo Solari in Arizona. Moving to New York City in the mid-1960s, Wilson found himself drawn to the work of pioneering choreographers George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Martha Graham, among others artists. By 1968 he had gathered a group of artists known as The Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, and together they worked and performed in a loft building at 147 Spring Street in lower Manhattan.

Performing Arts

In 1969 two of Wilson’s major productions appeared in New York City: The King of Spain at the Anderson Theater, and The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In 1971 Wilson received international acclaim for Deafman Glance (Le Regard du Sourd), a silent opera created in collaboration with Raymond Andrews, a talented deaf-mute boy whom Wilson had adopted. After the Paris premiere of the work, French Surrealist Louis Aragon wrote of Wilson, “he is what we, from whom Surrealism was born, dreamed would come after us and go beyond us.” Wilson then went on to present numerous acclaimed productions throughout the world, including the seven-day play KA MOUNTain and GUARDenia Terrace in Shiraz, Iran (1972); The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, a twelve-hour silent opera performed in New York, Europe, and South America (1973); and A Letter for Queen Victoria in Europe and New York (1974-1975). In 1976 Wilson joined with composer Philip Glass in writing the landmark work Einstein on the Beach, which was presented at the Festival d’Avignon and at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, and has since been revived in three world tours in 1984, 1992 and 2012-2015.

After Einstein, Wilson increasingly worked with European theaters and opera houses. His productions were frequently featured at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, the Schaubühne Berlin, the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, and the Salzburg Festival, among many other venues. At the Schaubühne he created Death Destruction & Detroit (1979) and Death Destruction & Detroit II (1987); and at the Thalia he presented four groundbreaking musical works, The Black Rider (1991), Alice (1992), Time Rocker (1996), and POEtry (2000).

In the early 1980's Wilson developed what still stands as his most ambitious project: the multinational epic the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down. Created in collaboration with an international group of artists, Wilson planned this opera as the centerpiece of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles. Although the full epic was never seen in its entirety, individual parts have been produced in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Robert Wilson has designed and directed operas at La Scala in Milan, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Opéra Bastille in Paris, the Zürich Opera, the Hamburg State Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Houston Grand Opera and the Moscow Bolshoi, among others. His productions include Salome (Milan, 1987), Parsifal (Hamburg, 1991), The Magic Flute (Paris, 1991), Lohengrin (Zürich, 1991), Madama Butterfly (Paris, 1993), Bluebeard’s Castle and Erwartung (Salzburg, 1995), Four Saints in Three Acts (Houston, 1996), Pelléas et Mélisande (Salzburg, 1997), Orpheus and Eurydice (Paris, 1999), Der Ring des Nibelungen (Zürich, 2000- 2002), Aida (Brussels, 2002), Leos Janacek’s Osud (Prague, 2002), Die Frau ohne Schatten (Paris, 2003), Gluck’s Alceste (Brussels, 2004), Bach’s Johannes‐Passion (Paris, 2007), Brecht/Weill’s Threepenny Opera (Berlin, 2007), Gounod’s Faust (Warsaw, 2008), Der Freischütz (Baden-Baden, 2009), Katya Kabanova (Prague, 2010), Norma (Zürich, 2011), Verdi’s Macbeth (Bologna / Sao Paulo, 2013), a Monteverdi trilogy consisting of L’Orfeo (2009), Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria (2011) and L’incoronazione di Poppea (2014) in Milan and Paris, La Traviata (Linz, 2015) and Turandot (Madrid, 2018).

He has presented innovative adaptations of works by writers such as Virginia Woolf (Orlando, Berlin, 1989), William Shakespeare (King Lear, Frankfurt, 1990; A Winter’s Tale, Berlin, 2005; The Tempest, Sofia, 2021; et.al.), Henrik Ibsen (When We Dead Awaken, Cambridge Mass., 1991; Lady from the Sea, Ferrara, 1998; Peer Gynt, Oslo, 2005), Gertrude Stein (Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Berlin, 1992; Saints and Singing, Berlin, 1997), Darryl Pinckney (Time Rocker, Hamburg, 1996; Mary Said What She Said, Paris, 2019; Dorian, Düsseldorf, 2022; et.al.), Wole Soyinka (Scourge of Hyacinths, Geneva, 1999), Georg Büchner (Woyzeck, Copenhagen, 2000), Jean de la Fontaine (Les Fables de la Fontaine, Paris, 2004), Samuel Beckett (Happy Days, Luxembourg, 2008; Krapp’s Last Tape, Spoleto, 2009), Homer (Odyssey, Athens, 2012), Daniil Kharms (The Old Woman, Manchester, 2013), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Faust I and II, Berlin, 2015), and Sophocles (Oedipus, Pompeii, 2018). His longstanding love to Indonesia led Robert Wilson to direct I La Galigo (Singapore, 2004), a play based on a sacred text from Southwest Sulawesi. Later on, Wilson directed Rumi: in the blink of the eye, based on Sufi mystic poetry (Athens, 2007), and 1433—The Grand Voyage, a Ming- Dynasty parable (Taiwan, 2010).

Wilson has collaborated with a number of internationally acclaimed artists, writers, and musicians. He worked closely with the late German playwright Heiner Müller on the Cologne section of the CIVIL warS (1984), Hamletmachine (1986), and Quartet (1987). With singer/song-writer Tom Waits, Wilson created the highly successful production The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets (Hamburg, 1991), as well as Alice (Hamburg, 1992) and Woyzeck (Copenhagen, 2000). His collaboration with Lou Reed also resulted in three works for the stage: Time Rocker (Hamburg, 1996), POEtry (Hamburg, 2000) and Lulu (Berlin, 2011). With David Byrne, Wilson staged The Knee Plays from the CIVIL warS (1984), and later The Forest, in honor of the 750th anniversary of the City of Berlin (1988). He worked with poet Allen Ginsberg on Cosmopolitan Greetings (1988) and with performance artist Laurie Anderson on Wilson's adaptation of Euripides's Alcestis (1986). Writer Susan Sontag joined Wilson in creating Alice in Bed (1993), and together they developed a new work, Lady from the Sea (1998), based on Ibsen’s classic and since revived in many different languages. Wilson's long association with noted opera singer Jessye Norman began with Great Day in the Morning (Paris, 1982) and continued with a stage and video work based on Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise in 2001. Other important collaborations include The Temptation of St. Anthony (Duisburg, 2003) and Zinnias (Montclair, 2013) with Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon; Büchner’s Leonce and Lena (Berlin, 2003) with Herbert Grönemeyer; The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic (Manchester, 2011) with Antony; Peter Pan (Berlin, 2013), Pushkin’s Fairy Tales (Moscow, 2015), Edda (Oslo, 2017), Jungle Book (Luxembourg, 2019) with CocoRosie, and The Sandman (Recklinghausen, 2017) with Anna Calvi.

Visual Arts

While known for creating highly acclaimed theatrical pieces, Wilson's work is firmly rooted in the fine arts. His drawings, paintings and sculptures have been presented around the world in hundreds of solo and group showings. Major Wilson exhibitions have appeared at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1991); the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1991); the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1991); and the Instituto de Valencia de Arte Moderno (1992). Wilson has created original installations for the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1993); London’s Clink Street Vaults (1995); Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (1997);Guggenheim Museum (2000); Museum of Art and Design Copenhagen (2000); Passionsfestspiele Oberammergau and Mass. MOCA (2000-2001); Vitra Design Museum in Weil, Germany (2001); the Parisian Galeries Lafayette (2002); Barbier- Mueller Museum for Precolumbian Art in Barcelona (2004); the Pierre Bergé Yves Saint Laurent Foundation (2004); Aichi World Exhibition Nagoya (2005); Oerol Festival (2008); Norsk Teknisk Museum Oslo (2011); Norfolk and Norwich Festival (2012); Kunstfest Weimar (2012); Minneapolis Institute of Art (2018); Max Ernst Museum Brühl (2018); Crystal Bridges (2021); Michelangelo Foundation (2022); mudac Lausanne (2022).

His tribute to Isamu Noguchi has been shown at Vitra Museum (2001), the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid (2002), the Rotterdam Kunsthal (2003), the Noguchi Garden Museum in New York (2004), the Seattle Art Museum (2006) and the L.A.- based Japanese American National Museum (2006). His installation of the Guggenheim’s Giorgio Armani retrospective (2000) traveled to Bilbao, Berlin, London, Rome, Tokyo, Shanghai and Milan (from 2000 to 2007). For the Louvre Museum in Paris, Wilson curated and designed the exhibit “Living Rooms,” featuring around 700 works from his art collection (2013).

In 2004 Robert Wilson started his Video Portraits, a series of HD video works on subjects that include celebrities such as Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, Winona Ryder, Alan Cumming, Jeanne Moreau, Johnny Depp, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Renee Fleming, Sean Penn and Robert Downey Jr. as well as a variety of animals (the Snowy Owl “KOOL”, a black panther, a porcupine etc.). These works have been shown in more than 50 exhibitions worldwide, including at MoMa PS1, Paula Cooper Gallery and Phillips de Pury & Co. in New York, Ace Gallery Los Angeles, Kunsthalle Hamburg, ZKM Karlsruhe, Academy of the Arts Berlin, Museum of Modern Art Salzburg, Times Square New York, Palazzo Madama Torino, the University of Toronto’s Art Center, AGSA Adelaide, and the Louvre Museum in Paris.

His drawings, prints, videos and sculptures are held in private collections and museums throughout the world, notably The Metropolitan Museum of Art; MoMA; the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Art Institute of Chicago; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Vitra Design Museum; Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Menil Foundation Collection, Houston.

Awards and Honors

A recipient of two Rockefeller and two Guggenheim fellowships, Wilson has been honored with numerous awards for excellence. In 1986 Wilson was the sole nominee for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for the CIVIL warS. He received two Hewes Design Awards for A Letter to Queen Victoria (1975) and the CIVIL warS Act V (1987); a Bessie Award for The Knee Plays (1987); two Italian Premio Ubu awards for Alice and Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1994 and 1992); the Golden Lion Award for Sculpture of the Venice Biennale for Memory/Loss (1993); the German Theater Critics Award for The Black Rider (1990); a Reumert Prize for Woyzeck (2001); the Smithsonian National Design Award (2001); the French Theater Critics Award for A Dream Play (2002); an International Design and Communication Award for Mind Gap (2012); and an Olivier Award for Einstein on the Beach as “Best New Opera Production” (2013).

Wilson was honored with several lifetime achievement awards, including: Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (1996); Premio Europa for Theater, Taormina (1997); Tadeusz Kantor Prize, Cracow (1997); Pushkin Prize, Moscow (1999); Rosa d’Oro, Palermo (2007); Prix Italian and the Fendi Foundation Award (both in 2012); Paez Medal of Art / Venezuela (2013) and the German Goethe Institute’s Medal for the Arts (2014). He has been named a “Lion of the Performing Arts” by the New York Public Library (1989); “Texas Artist of the Year” by the Art League of Houston (1995); received an Institute Honor from The American Institute of Architects in New York City (1988); the Harvard Excellence in Design Award (1998); and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2000). The President of France pronounced him Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (2003) and later Officer of the Legion of Honor (2014). The President of Germany awarded him the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit (2014). In 2023, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale by the Japan Art Association.

Wilson holds Honorary Doctorate degrees from the Pratt Institute (1991), the California College of Arts and Crafts (1994), the University of Toronto (2005), the University of Bucharest (2008), the American University of Paris (2010), the City University of New York (2013), the Sorbonne Nouvelle University (2013) and the University of Hartford (2016). In 1997, April 18th was declared “Robert Wilson Day” by the legislature in the State of Texas.

Robert Wilson’s Legacy

Since the early 1990s, Robert Wilson has held workshops for students and experienced creative professionals from around the world at the International Summer Arts Program at The Watermill Center in Eastern Long Island – an interdisciplinary laboratory for the Arts and Humanities. Following a successful capital campaign, construction of a permanent facility was completed in the summer of 2006, enabling the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation to offer residencies, lectures and performances, and educational programs throughout the year.

Image courtesy of the artist, the Watermill Center Collection and RW Work Ltd

Evan Yee is a sculptor, designer and metalworker who co-founded a collaborative studio in Brooklyn, New York. The studio, Liberty Labs Foundation, hosts independent designers, artists, architects and highly skilled artisans. Located in the historic Liberty Warehouse, it was once home to the Statue of Liberty before it was installed in New York Harbor in 1886.

Originally from Oakland, California, Yee began splitting his time between there and Sag Harbor as a teenager. It was then, that a bi-coastal arts practice began to emerge. Yee eventually got his BFA from Pratt Institute with a major in sculpture and an emphasis in metalwork. That skillset set him on a path to pursuing artwork, furniture design and fabrication.

Yee’s sculpture work is often a critique of current trends and objects. His past installation “The App Store” for the 2014 Parrish Road show, set up a fake Apple store with sculpture that questioned the technological optimisms of the time. Later, his work for the “Museum of Capitalism” took objects and cast them in amber or core samples to look at the Anthropocene from a futuristic lens. Yee’s current work focuses on taking familiar things of the everyday and distorting their materiality.

Image courtesy of the artist. 

Lindsay Morris resides on the East End of Long Island with her husband and two sons. She is a freelance photographer and photo editor of Edible Magazine. In her latest project she is getting acquainted with her immediate neighbors. 

Lindsay’s work has been featured on BBC World News and published in New York Magazine, TIME, The New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, GEO, Marie Claire, Elle and Vanity Fair. 

Recent exhibitions include ICP, #ICPConcerned Responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic, The Newport Art Museum, RI, The Parrish Art Museum, NY, the Hamburg Triennial, Germany, Fotofest, Houston, Photoville Brooklyn, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, solo exhibitions at Clamp Art, NY, Rayko Photo Center, San Francisco and the Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO. 

Morris is a producer of the 2016 BBC commissioned documentary, My Transgender Summer Camp and has published her first monograph with Kehrer Verlag, You Are You, documenting a summer camp for gender-creative children and their families. 

Lindsay began her studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a BFA from the University of Michigan School of Art. 

Photo courtesy of the artist.