Taking Shape: Sculpture at the Addison

Taking Shape is designed both to celebrate a selection of the museum’s significant sculpture collection and to serve as a complement to the traveling exhibition Making it Modern: The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman. While small in number, the collection includes important works in a variety of materials—wood, bronze, ceramic, marble, stone, and mixed media. 

Objects in this presentation range from large weathervanes and carved signs by unidentified artists to small figures by recognized artists such as Malvina Hoffman, Alexander Calder, and Chaim Gross; from ambitious figurative sculpture by well-known sculptors such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Paul Manship, Herbert Haseltine, and Robert Laurent to important contemporary works by Siah Armajani, Theodore Roszak, Louise Nevelson, Martin Puryear, Carl Andre, Carroll Dunham, Mel Kendrick, and Kendra Ferguson. From functional to decorative, roughhewn to painstakingly polished, representational to abstract, this group of artworks is testament to the limitless possibilities born out of artistic explorations in three dimensions.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website