Alice Aycock

Alice Aycock has lived in New York City since 1968. She received a B.A. from Douglass College and an M.A. from Hunter College. She was represented by the John Weber Gallery in New York City from 1976 through 2001 and has exhibited in major museums and galleries nationally as well as Europe and Japan. Currently she is represented by Marlborough Gallery, New York and Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin. She had her first solo exhibition of new sculptures with Marlborough in the fall of 2017. Her works can be found in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, the LA County Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Sheldon Museum of Art, Storm King Art Center, and the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany. She exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Documenta VI and VIII and the Whitney Biennial. 
 
She has had three major retrospectives. The first was organized by the Wurttembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart in 1983 and traveled to Kolnischer Kunstverein Koln; Sculpturenmuseum Glaskasten, Marl; Haags Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag; Kunstmuseum Luzern. In 1990, a retrospective exhibition entitled “Complex Visions” was organized by the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY. In 2013, a retrospective of her drawings and small sculptures was exhibited at the new Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York coinciding with the Grey Art Gallery in New York City. The exhibition traveled to the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2014. A fully illustrated catalogue, “Some Stories are Worth Repeating,” with an essay by Jonathan Fineberg accompanied the retrospective. She received the International Association of Art Critics Award for this exhibition. MIT Press published the artist’s first hardcover monograph, entitled Alice Aycock, Sculpture and Projects, authored by Robert Hobbs in 2005. The International Sculpture Center presented her with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture in 2018, and she received an Academy of the Arts Achievement Award in Visual Arts from Guild Hall in March 2019. 
 
Her early works are land art pieces that involve reshaping the earth such as A Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels, 1975/2012, permanently reconstructed at Omi International Arts Center, Ghent, NY. Clay #2, first executed in 1971, was reproduced for “Ends of the Earth: Art of the Land to 1974,” a comprehensive survey of the period held in 2012 at LAMOCA and traveling to Haus der Kunst, Munich. 
 
In 2014, a series of seven sculptures were installed on the Park Avenue Malls in New York City, entitled Park Avenue Paper Chase, in collaboration with Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin. Three of the sculptures traveled to Chicago and are exhibited on the Lakefront. Two were exhibited in “Beyond Limits: Sotheby’s at Chatsworth” at the Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, UK in 2013/2014. In 2015, Hoop-La was exhibited in a large outdoor sculpture exhibition in Bad Homburg, Germany. 
 
Aycock’s public sculptures can be found in many major cities in the U.S. Some of her public commissions include East River Roundabout (1995/2014) for the East River Park Pavilion at 60th Street in New York City and Functional and Fantasy Stair and Cyclone Fragment (1996) at the San Francisco Public Library in collaboration with architect James Ingo Freed of Pei, Cobb, Freed and Partners. Star Sifter for Terminal One at JFK International Airport was completed in 1998 and resited above the entrance to the security zone in 2013. Other public installations include Swing Over, GSA Building, Baltimore, MD (2004); Ghost Ballet for the East Bank Machineworks, Nashville, Tennessee (2008); Whirls and Swirls and a Vortex on Water, Central Broward Regional Park County (2008); and The Game of Flyers Part Two, Washington Dulles International Airport (2012). In 2016, she completed a large-scale outdoor public artwork in Coral Gables, FL, and an 80-foot long entrance sculpture for the new MGM National Harbor, MD. She installed a sculpture for the lobby of 50 West, New York, NY in July 2017. A permanent large-scale installation was inaugurated at Pier 27 on the Toronto waterfront in the fall of 2017, as well as an entry sculpture for the new Capital One headquarters in McLean, VA in 2018. A solo exhibition of works from 1971 through 2019 will be presented at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany in the summer of 2019. 
 
Photo by Kristine Larsen.