Special Events

Free Public Lecture by internationally
acclaimed artist Judy Pfaff

Tuesday, April 2, 2024, 7:30 p.m.
Wanamaker Hall, Principia College, Elsah, IL 62028

Judy Pfaff’s prolific artistic career spans more than five decades. Highly influential and renowned for her site-specific installations, Pfaff creates work that spans disciplines and eschews definition. She has ceaselessly reinvented her distinctive visual lexicon, employing conventional and unconventional materials. Like an alchemist, she transforms the mundane and ordinary into something extraordinary and mesmerizing. Pfaff adores investigating materials and handcrafting all her objects as painter, sculptor, carpenter, welder, glassblower, printmaker, and designer. Guided by intuition, Pfaff makes her singular vision concrete by creating surprising combinations of objects that highlight life’s contradictory forces and inherent duality. Her work is a topography of human emotions, the nexus of countless storylines linking the events of our time to our personal and collective experiences.

Regarded as a major pioneer of installation art, Pfaff has had more than 100 solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad and received numerous prestigious awards, including the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2014), a MacArthur Fellowship (2004), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1983). She represented the United States in the 1998 São Paulo Biennial, and her work has been included in three Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1975, 1981, and 1987). Her work is in numerous prominent collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Tate Gallery (London).

_{(Source: Introduction to the 2023-2024 exhibition, “Picking Up the Pieces” at The Sarasota Art Museum, Florida, and Judy Pfaff Studio)}