Jennifer Krasinski
The artist’s “Girl Group” of sculptures at Storm King burst forth with color, mischief, and intelligence.
Arlene Shechet: Girl Group, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery. Photo: David Schulze. Pictured: Midnight, 2024.
Arlene Shechet: Girl Group, cocurated by Nora Lawrence and Eric Booker with Adela Goldsmith, Storm King Art Center, 20 Old Pleasant Hill Road, New Windsor, New York, through November 10, 2024
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Harmonies. Hairdos. Chart-topping hits. The “girl group” is pop’s glittering Hydra, a multiheaded, mythical creature and guardian of a femininity designed to deliver uncomplicated pleasures via types of beauty and tropes of love, all played to perfection. Siren songs may beckon the sailors, but they never rock the boat. Their insurgence is conducted by way of sweetness, seduction, which is how a Hydra can sometimes double as a Trojan Horse. Six supremely delectable painted-metal sculptures are the frontwomen of Arlene Shechet’s Girl Group, on view at Storm King Art Center, the lush and wondrous five-hundred-acre museum devoted to presenting art outdoors. Alongside these newly commissioned sculptures is a gallery show of smaller pieces by Shechet in ceramic, wood, and steel, many made during quarantine. That period of cocooning is now releasing its butterflies, and the artist lets viewers see the transformations: from pedestaled meditations on time and solitude to larger-than-life go-getters, defiantly gendered and prettily rebelling.
Arlene Shechet: Girl Group, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery. Photo: David Schulze. Pictured, left to right: Together: 8 p.m., 2020; May Morning: Together, 2023; Together: Waking, 2024; Together: 9 a.m., 2020.
Although she has never given herself over to a single medium, Shechet is perhaps best known for eccentric, abstract ceramics. She improvises these forms, mostly by hand, appending them to plinths and bases, or pieces of wood and steel, or whatever other materials infuse them with greater force—vibes, one might say. These works can be unexpectedly contemplative, not for their quietude—they are often unapologetic scene-stealers—but for their formal lucidity. Details quickly reroute our attention. Of the sculptures on display in Storm King’s gallery, a small fiery-red drip seems ready to drop from one of the apertures of Together: Midnight (2020). A shiny yellow-green slick of what looks like spilled paint tops Together Again: Fall (2022). Inside the wide maw of Together: 9 a.m. (2020) is a bubbling, foaming terrain of chartreuse against dark violet. A hole at its bottom gives a straight shot of the floor.
Arlene Shechet, Together: Rapunzel, 2023–24. Courtesy Storm King Art Center. Photo: David Schulze.
Shechet’s amazing glazes don’t dabble in the usual surface seductions. At once mouthwatering and repellent, they elicit ambivalence. Some are like the skins of alien fruit, others like fuzzy-wuzzy frosting on a spoiled birthday cake. There is no lulling here, really, just more and more looking to do. The ceramic works with “Together” in their titles—repeated like a mantra, or a reminder—refer to the COVID years, when our relationship to time went weird. It became the thing we could no longer measure with certainty, and the thing we felt we had to mark with diligence. Most of these sculptures, including those made recently, are nods to different times of day, of those years: Waking (2024), In the Afternoon (2024), May Monday (2022).
Arlene Shechet: Girl Group, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery. Photo: David Schulze. Pictured: Rapunzel, 2024.
An outlier, Together: Rapunzel (2023–24), is perched next to the gallery window, through which we can see her alter-ego: the sky-shaming-blue Rapunzel (2024), one of Shechet’s six outdoor sculptures in stainless steel and aluminum. Their forms—which are ten to twenty feet high, and up to thirty feet long—don’t loom so much as burst forth, make an entrance, dance alongside the group’s silent, seventh member: Mother Nature. They need no spotlight. Shechet has painted each in “girlish” colors to stand apart from both landscape and the works by other artists sited nearby. As April (2024) is a springy yellow and green, Bea Blue (2024) a robin’s egg, and Maiden May (2023) a rich forest-green, while Midnight (2024) is painted in deep rose and tangerine to mimic the sunset. When the eye sees more than this, and it will, thank the movement of the sun and its casting of shadows—not to mention the dupe shadows that Shechet sneaks into the paint jobs to fool a little with your depth perception. No smoke and mirrors here, though. These girls have real substance, intelligence. They may possess the precision of the digital confections we’re very used to seeing these days, but in fact Shechet finished them all by hand. Note, again, the details: the big bolts, the hand-burnishing in spots; blobs of once-molten metal at the seams.
Arlene Shechet: Girl Group, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery. Photo: David Schulze. Pictured: Bea Blue, 2024.
Girl Group is also a mischievous jab at Storm King’s “boy band,” which is made up of some of the all-stars of public art: Calder, Caro, Serra, Moore, and more. To be fair, it’s a genre that unleashes a certain machismo in all genders, calling forth derring-dos of scale, material, and engineering. Mark di Suvero’s gargantuan Figolu (2005–11) frames the skyscape and landscape with its bright orange-red beams, one of which boasts three enormous steel balls dangling from its tip. (The joke writes itself, I suppose.) There can be a gaudiness to that kind of artificial danger, which also reduces works like Menashe Kadishman’s Suspended (1977) into something closer to a theme-park attraction: a balancing act of extreme tonnage that merely sets the stage for a death-defying photo op. For all its pristine fabrication and optical delight, the gleaming white cubes of Sol LeWitt’s Five Modular Units (1971, refabricated 2008) look so, well, square against the lush grass and rustling trees. Up the hill from LeWitt, however, is the balm of Martin Puryear’s breathtaking Lookout (2023), a meticulously crafted, bulbous brick shelter punctured all over with oculi to offer the elements welcome refuge, too. Standing in its center, one is treated to a perfectly framed view of Storm King’s glories.
Arlene Shechet: Girl Group, installation view. Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery. Photo: David Schulze. Pictured: Dawn, 2024.
Shechet may be pointed, but she is also generous, her thought-lines extending outward, embracing the context of her peers (whether the peers would appreciate it or not), shifting how we take them all in. The success of pop’s great girl groups has always depended on how they not only reigned as role models but also felt like their fans’ best friends. Where a diva is solo, even feral, a girl group pledges allegiance to other women, and I couldn’t help but note how comparatively morose the work of the other female sculptors at Storm King could be, which led to a question (to which I haven’t yet arrived at a satisfying answer) about whether (or why) men have traditionally understood public art as feat where women think of it as monument—a “dazzle versus gravitas” differential. It’s funny to see Shechet’s giddy Dawn—a near-pirouette in salmon-pink and pale-lilac—within shouting distance of Louise Nevelson’s City on the High Mountain (1983), a superiorly chic steel assemblage in the artist’s usual, infallible all-black. Also nearby is North South East West (1988/2009/2014–15), a far-out cast-bronze fountain by Lynda Benglis that looks like a molten coven gathered around a rather demure spout, while acres away Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Sarcophagi in Glass Houses (1989) holds us at a stone’s throw from grief. Tacitly adding these heads to Shechet’s Hydra, Girl Group delivers a potent hit.
Jennifer Krasinski is a writer, critic, and editor.