Alice Aycock
Artist Alice Aycock was not only a graduate of Hunter College, but also an esteemed professor at the school. Former students have equally praised her as a dedicated educator and prolific sculptor. Aycock has lived in New York City since 1968, when she moved to the city for the MA program at Hunter College. Active in the downtown art community in the 1960s and ’70s, she exhibited at 112 Greene Street, an experimental space run by her friend and fellow artist Gordon Matta-Clark. Aycock’s early land art pieces involved reshaping the earth, as in A Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels, Low Building With Dirt Roof (For Mary), and the Williams College Project, situated on land in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Permanent reconstructions of Low Building with Dirt Roof (for Mary), were installed at Storm King Art Center in 2010, and A Simple Network… from 1975 was sited in 2012 at Omi International Arts Center, in Ghent, New York.
Aycock’s public sculptures and commissions can be found in many major cities in the U.S. Recent work Park Avenue Paper Chase, a series of seven sculptures, was installed on the Park Avenue Malls in New York City in collaboration with Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin. Three of the sculptures traveled to the Chicago Lakefront in August 2014. Two other works from this series were exhibited in “Beyond Limits: Sotheby’s at Chatsworth” at the Chatsworth House, in Derbyshire, UK, in 2013 and 2014. In 2015, Hoop-La was exhibited in a large outdoor sculpture exhibition in Bad Homburg, Germany. In the summer of 2020, six large-scale sculptures from the Turbulence Series were installed in an outdoor exhibition at the Royal Djurgården in Stockholm, Sweden.
She has had four major retrospectives since 1983, and most recently works from 1971 through 2019 were exhibited at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany. Her works can be found in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the LA County Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Sheldon, Storm King Art Center, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, and the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany. She exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Documenta VI and VIII, and the Whitney Biennial. Currently she is represented by Marlborough Gallery, New York, and Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin.
She has received numerous awards including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. She was inducted into the National Academy, New York City, in 2013. Aycock 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 in New York since 1991 and was a visiting artist at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore from 2010 to 2014. Aycock was a commissioner on the NYC Design Commission from 2003 to 2012. 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 East Hampton in March 2019.