Judy Fox

Judy Fox is an American sculptor. She was an early forerunner in the 1980s to painted contemporary figuration and the later acceptance of ceramics in the art world, producing work that combined present-day themes and strategies with traditions resurrected from painted renaissance and gothic church carvings. Fox's sculptures and installations reinterpret archetypes, folklore, creation myths and iconic figures from wide-ranging cultures and historical periods. Her terra cotta works range from realistic, ethnically diverse, life-sized nudes—babies, prepubescent children and adults—to surrealist, invented creatures. Alternately regarded as playful, subversive or controversial, they explore gender and multiculturalism, as well as relationships between culture, biology, humanity and primitive life. Her art belongs to the collections of the Albertina and Mumok (Museum Moderner Kunst) in Vienna, the Honolulu Museum of Art and Mint Museum, among others. She is based in Rhinebeck, New York in the Hudson Valley and teaches at the New York Academy of Art.

Education and exhibitions Fox was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1957. In the ensuing two decades, she balanced work restoring modern and contemporary art with her traditional figurative sculpture practice. She appeared in the Venice Biennale (1995) and surveys at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago ("My Little Pretty," 1997), Tate ("Uncanny," 2004), Essl Museum ("Figur Skulptur," 2005) and Chazen Museum of Art ("The Human Condition," 2014). Later solo exhibitions took place at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (2001) and The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu (2010), and at galleries including P.P.O.W. and Nancy Hoffman in New York, Ace Gallery in Los Angeles and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, among others. Several writers attribute this to her transpositions of iconic, adult poses and gestures on to the bodies of children, and of idiom, as psychically distanced, stylized types become palpably real individuals in the finished sculptures (e.g., Courtesan, 1995). and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1988, 1994), National Sculpture Society (2008) and New York Foundation for the Arts (2009). She has been awarded artist residencies from MacDowell and Yaddo.

Fox's art is held in the public collections of the Albertina (Vienna), Honolulu Museum of Art,

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