Shari Mendelson is a sculptor living and working in Brooklyn and upstate New York. Her sculptures are influenced by ancient art and are constructed primarily from found plastic bottles.
Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Sculpture Magazine, Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications.
Mendelson received an MFA from the State University at New Paltz and a BFA from Arizona
State University.
Mendelson’s work is in the permanent collection of The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH, The Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston, TX, The RISD Museum, Providence, RI, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA,
and The Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania, AU.
Mendelson has been the recipient of four New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships (2017, 2011, 1997, and 1987), a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (1989), and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant (2017). She has been a resident at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Bau Institute/Camargo Foundation. Mendelson has been a visiting artist at UrbanGlass, The Corning Museum of Glass, The Toledo Museum of Art, and Pilchuck School of Glass.
Artist’s Statement
With equal parts reverence and play, I reinterpret these pieces using discarded plastic
water, soda, and juice bottles. I collect, cut into pieces and glue the plastic parts into
new sculptures. The convex and concave shapes found in our plastic trash offers a
wealth of material from which to build. Some of my pieces are coated with mixed
materials and/or glaze-like layers of polymers and paint, which vary the levels of
transparency and opacity, emphasize or obscure the original material, and alter the
visual and actual weight. At first glance my work may look like the glass or ceramic yet
upon closer look, a logo, recycling stamp or expiration date reveals the actual material.
Using plastic bottles to make works that reference objects of the past offers me a space
to playfully explore the transformation of form and material while reflecting on issues of
history, culture, and value.
Work shown courtesy of Tibor De Nagy Gallery, New York City
