Meet the Artist: Judy Pfaff

January 2024—As residents along Florida’s coast endure the busiest months of hurricane season, a New York-based artist has transformed Sarasota Art Museum’s galleries with a site-specific installation inspired by one of the state’s costliest natural disasters. In Picking up the Pieces, Judy Pfaff explores the devastating impact of Hurricane Ian that battered southern Florida as a Category 4 storm in September 2022. In her largest solo show since 2017, Pfaff is presenting paintings, assemblages, and sculptures that celebrate Florida’s beauty and acknowledge its vulnerability to environmental threats.

“Seeing with my own eyes the major impact Ian had on the land and homes completely shook me,” said Pfaff. Exploring the area was reminiscent of her childhood in post-World War II London and her experiences living in New York during 9/11 when white dust blanketed the area following the collapse of the World Trade Center. “In Picking up the Pieces, I use ordinary materials and natural detritus to distill what I saw during my visit to Florida.”

Judy Pfaff routinely uses elements from her garden, hand-painted images, welded steel, Plexiglas, wood, photographs, melted plastic, blown glass, neon, and LED lights to build captivating, large-scale installations that invite viewers on a fantastic and unexpected journey. She’s also created a plethora of new objects for this exhibition, including several translucent fiberglass boats made from a mold at her studio.

Judy Pfaff, whose artistic practice spans more than five decades, made her museum debut in Sarasota over 40 years ago. She advocated for a contemporary art museum to be brought to the region when there were talks of renovating the former high school, and was among the first to foster awareness for what would become the region’s newest and only contemporary art museum.

Pfaff has held more than 100 solo exhibitions in the United States and abroad, and has received numerous awards, including an 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 works are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney American Museum of Art (New York), and Tate Britain (London), among others.

“Judy Pfaff: Picking up the Pieces” is on view at Sarasota Art Museum November 19 – March 24, 2024.