Course full – please email Registrar Stephanie Bowman, sbowman@nyss.org, to join the waitlist. 

Course Description

In 1959 the cold war was a black mirror, in which Mankind as proposed by the Greeks, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment hardly recognised itself.

That shows in the sculpture of the fifties.  MoMA’s New Images of Man exhibition, we see now, was a first look at our future.

This course is a round of twentieth Century sculptural “problems” rooted in the mid-century.  What Picasso, Moore, Giacometti, DeKooning and Noguchi had on their minds then, is the basis of sculpture in Chelsea and uptown, now.  By trying out their personal, obsessive go-to working methods, we can see the world through their eyes.  And over the shoulders of artists working today.

We will work in clay with and without a model. Previous experience in working from life, is welcome, but not at all needed.  You might be surprised at how much sculpture from life depends on a problem, rather than the model.

You’ll walk away with a suite of various and peculiar terra cottas.  Each is a permanent imprint of a thought, a feeling, a deed and a moment: terra cotta remembers everything.  How basic are these “problems?”  Let’s start with the skull– we investigate the cabinet of the soul.  Believe me, you’ll have plenty to think about these Monday evenings, and for a long time to come.

Course Syllabus