Sculpture occupies an odd place in contemporary art. Because of their sheer physical presence, sculptures are often harder to show, not to mention more difficult to sell: This fact forces the medium into a secondary role behind painting, especially in a business so obsessed with the markets. And yet, sculpture is arguably the art that the public, throughout history, has tended to interact with the most, even if we’re not always paying it much attention. Sculpture is an indelible part of the global landscape. It’s in our public plazas, our corporate office parks. Celebrated (and often meticulously preserved) as a form of creative expression across the world, sculpture goes back to the prehistoric age, to early peoples’ use of stone flints to carve anthropomorphic figures out of mammoth ivory. Every culture since has made its own totems, sometimes to mark its triumphs and tragedies, and sometimes for reasons that are less clear.
To choose the 25 most important works of sculpture made since 1945, we asked a panel of experts to gather at the New York Times building in March. They included the artists Firelei Báez, 45; Charles Gaines, 82; Adam Pendleton, 42; and Arlene Shechet, 77 — each of whom has, to varying degrees, explored and advanced sculpture in their work — along with Ruba Katrib, 44, the chief curator of MoMA PS1 in Queens and the former curator of the nearby SculptureCenter, the only museum in New York explicitly dedicated to the medium. Any task that ends in anointing something “the most important” is highly subjective and should be considered with a heavy dose of skepticism; a different group would have come up with different selections, and it’s easy to imagine the following list turning out differently had this same group met at a different time on the same day.
Melvin Edwards, “Lynch Fragments,” 1963-2026
The blades of an open pair of scissors glisten menacingly atop a cluster of interlocking steel scraps, bound by a thick chain and mounted against the wall. One of about 300 small-scale welded steel reliefs in Melvin Edwards’s series “Lynch Fragments,” the stark creation confronts the viewer at eye level like a gnarled head or a nightmarish mask. Edwards, who died this year at age 88, a few weeks after T’s panel met, grew up Black in segregated Texas in the 1940s and ’50s. He was partly inspired by “100 Years of Lynchings,” the journalist Ralph Ginzburg’s 1962 publication on racial violence in America. The year after it came out, Edwards, working in his Los Angeles studio, began welding together industrial and farming tools like railroad spikes, car parts, bolts, nails, gears, padlocks, rakes, hammers and ax heads into these dense, experimental sculptures.
