Visiting Judy Pfaff’s studio is special because I know I’ll see things I’ve never seen before. Pfaff’s fluent, unpredictable art spans a long career that includes the 2004 MacArthur “genius” award (given over a 5-year period) and the 2014 International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement Award.
When Pfaff found her Tivoli studio, this former apple orchard had both flooded and burned. The standing structures needed roofs, floors, doors, windows, and other major building and infrastructure construction. As a child growing up in war-torn England and a predominantly African American neighborhood in Detroit, Pfaff created her own art fantasy worlds. She has deftly fashioned the insides of prior studios in rundown industrial parts of Brooklyn and Kingston, New York. Her Thanksgiving eviction (the building was sold) from the Kingston riverside studio in 2001 gave her little time to move. Tivoli became her greatest reconstruction challenge.
