Alyson Shotz


Alyson Shotz is a contemporary American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Born at Luke Air Force Base, Glendale, Arizona, she graduated with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987 and an MFA from the University of Washington in 1991.

Career

Alyson Shotz investigates concepts of space, light, perception and gravity with sculptures made from a range of materials such as mirror, glass beads, plastic lenses, thread and steel wire.
Shotz was included in the exhibition Art & Space at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and has been included in exhibitions such as The More Things Change, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Contemplating the Void and The Shapes of Space, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Light and Landscape, Storm King Art Center, and Living Color, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, and Pattern: Follow the Rules at the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.

Shotz has had solo exhibitions at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana, The Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, and Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, among others. Shotz was an Arts Institute Research Fellow at Stanford University in 2014 and 2015, and a Sterling Visiting Scholar, Stanford University, 2012. She received a Pollock Krasner Award in 2010, the Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in 2007, and was the 2005-2006 Happy and Bob Doran Artist in Residence at Yale University Art Gallery. Her work is included in numerous public collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana, among others.
In The New York Times, Karen Rosenberg wrote: "Ms. Shotz evokes natural phenomena with accumulations of beads, pins and other common materials.... Often they respond to the challenge of visualizing concepts from theoretical physics."

Art reviews

The New York Times: