Featuring artist Arlene Shechet in conversation with Stanford University professor Alexander Nemerov

This year, we are honored to welcome award winning sculptor Arlene Shechet, featured artist in The Journey Continues, who will be in conversation with Stanford Professor Alexander Nemerov, distinguished scholar of American culture.

Date: May 5, 2025
Time: 6:00–7:30 p.m.
Location: Oshman Hall, McMurtry Building

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About the Speakers

Arlene Shechet
Award-winning Sculptor
Lifetime Member, American Academy of Arts and Letters

Arlene Shechet is a sculptor known for her effortless combination of disparate elements and boundary-collapsing visual paradoxes. With gravity-defying work that seems to tilt, contort, bend, and melt, Shechet’s sculptures appear to be set in motion while remaining still. Highly technical and yet entirely intuitive, her work embraces improvisation and seeks to examine the humor and pathos of being alive and in a body. Shechet has led a resurgence of ceramic work and sculpture in contemporary art through her experiments with glazes, hybrid forms, and pedestals by embracing risk, rejecting binaries, and leaning into—and driving dialogue between—the underlying tensions of not only form and material, but life itself.

In 2023, Shechet was elected as a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This follows many other awards and honors including the CAA Artist Award for a Distinguished Body of Work, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In 2024, one of the monumental sculptures from her much lauded exhibition, Girl Group, was acquired by Storm King Art Center for their permanent collection. Shechet’s work is in over fifty public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Centre Pompidou, National Gallery of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Nasher Sculpture Center, Walker Art Center, and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Alexander Nemerov
Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities
Stanford University

Alexander Nemerov is the author of many books on American art, most recently The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, praised by the novelist Annie Proulx as “one of the richest books ever to come my way—deeply beautiful, achingly painful and astonishingly tender”; and Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, named by Vogue one of its best books of 2021 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford.