Artist Judy Pfaff has won numerous awards, among them a MacArthur Fellowship; and now, ten years after the MacArthur, she has yet another feather to put in her cap: the International Sculpture Center (ISC)’s 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award. Pfaff, a longtime professor of the Arts at Bard and co-director of the college’s Studio Arts Program, has the added pleasure of sharing the honor with her close friend and fellow sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard, who also is being recognized by the ISC (stay tuned for an upcoming Almanac Weekly piece on von Rydingsvard). “We have both known each other since I started teaching at Yale in 1980 or 1981,” said Pfaff. “We shared a studio in Brooklyn for 26 years.”
While she characterized von Rydingsvard as “the quintessential sculptor,” Pfaff noted that her own installations and assemblages evolved out of painting. Hence the award points to the crossover tendencies of sculpture in recent years, especially evident in the more hybrid sculptures of the younger generation, who are deploying video, performance and other nontraditional approaches.
The ISC officials call Pfaff “a pioneer of site-specific installation art in the 1970s. She combines painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and architecture to create works that are equally dependent on intense planning and improvisation.”
