Alice Aycock

Alice Aycock was born in Harrisburg, PA. 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 Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin and Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Miami. Her works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, LA County Museum, and the National Gallery. She exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Documenta VI and VIII in Kassel, Germany and the Whitney Biennial. She has had two 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, the second retrospective entitled “Complex Visions” was organized by the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY. A retrospective of her drawings at the new Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, NY coinciding with the Grey Art Gallery, NY opened in April of 2013. The retrospective will then travel to the University Art Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2014. A reconstruction of “A Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels” from 1975 is currently sited at Omi International Arts Center, in Ghent, NY.

Aycock's early public works are land pieces that involve reshaping the earth such as A Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels, Low Building With Dirt Roof (For Mary), and the Williams College Project, all situated on farms in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts While these pieces have become subjected to the weather and are no longer there, she has continuously worked on outdoor pieces and installations that are permanently sited in public and private places. A long list of these pieces includes: The Solar Wind, in Salem, VA, The House Of Stoics, in Lake Biwa, Japan, The Tower Of Babel, in Buhsnami Sculpture Garden near Houston, Texas, The Island of the Moons and Suns, Robert Orton's sculpture garden in La Jolla, CA, Fantasy Sculpture II, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Summaries of Arithmetic Through Dust, Including Writing Not Yet Printed, at the entrance to the Engineering Department, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Aycock's public sculptures can be found in many major cities in the U.S. Some of her public commissions include a roof top sculpture for the 107th Police Precinct House in Queens, NY in collaboration with the architects Perkins, Eastman and a Waterworks installation built adjacent to a new Medical Facility at the University of Nebraska in Omaha.

Aycock has been a member of the New York City Design Commission since 2003 and she has also been appointed to the GSA's National Register of Peer Professionals. She received the Americans for the Arts Public Art Award in 2008 for “Ghost Ballet for the East Bank Machineworks” in Nashville, Tennessee. She has taught at numerous colleges and universities including Yale University (1988-92) and as the Director of Graduate Sculpture Studies (1991-92). She has been teaching at the School of Visual Arts since 1991, and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore since 2010.

Courtesy of the artist.