The recent late-life critical embrace of a generation of underappreciated major female artists — the 91-year-old nude self-portraitist Joan Semmel, the 84-year-old visual artist and sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud, the 87-year-old performance and multimedia provocateur Joan Jonas and the Cuban-born abstractionist Carmen Herrera, who died two years ago at age 106 — has brought a measure of satisfaction to the sculptor Arlene Shechet.
Also, a good bit of eye rolling.
“C’mon now, Carmen had to get to her 90s before people cared,” she says, standing in her roughly 5,000-square-foot Kingston studio, about two hours north of New York City, on a rainy late spring morning, attired in her usual work garb of a knitted cap and an indigo Japanese frock coat now used as a smock, flecked with clay dust and wood chips.
“Everyone says ‘Oh, isn’t it so great that these women are getting their due?’ Actually, when you think about it, it’s pretty horrifying.”The 75-year-old Shechet — bemused, kinetic, indomitable — is not in danger of having to wait to be recognized, but you might not realize that, given the furious pace at which she continues to make art.
Although she spent the early years of her career teaching at her alma mater, the Rhode Island School of Design, and at Parsons, and raising two children, now in their 30s, in an 1866 building in TriBeCa, continuing to sculpt in a basement studio after their bedtime, she has made up for lost time.
Persons:
—, Joan Semmel, Barbara Chase, Joan Jonas, abstractionist Carmen Herrera, Arlene Shechet, C’mon, Carmen, ”
Organizations:
Rhode Island School of Design
Locations:
Cuban, Kingston, New York City, Parsons, TriBeCa