Judy Pfaff thought she’d be a painter. She graduated from Yale with an MFA in the discipline in 1973, but she was bored. “Painters didn’t interest me—the way they talked about things,” 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.
So she decided to teach herself sculpture instead, guided less by mentors than by curiosity. “I kept buying these funny little books,” she recalled, “like 100 Experiments for the Scientist—books for children about how to do things.” The artist said it reminded her of Mr. Wizard, the TV scientist who turned household experiments into wonder.
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’s Hudson Valley studio is a riot of eclectic materials, exploding with colors and industrial scraps that she transforms into maximalist sculptures and installations.
Pfaff, now 79, has become one of America’s 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’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. But even with all these accolades, she continues to experiment.
Her latest fixation is neon. Soft, multicolored lights are embedded throughout her new exhibition, Light Years, on view at Cristin Tierney 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’s 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’s a bold, luminous turn for an artist who has spent her career pushing color and form into new dimensions.
