Lisa Le Feuvre, Great Women Sculptors — HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark

Lecture

Art historian, author and curator Lisa Le Feuvre has been involved with sculpture in contemporary art in various capacities throughout her career. For many years, she developed an outstanding program for the Henry Moore Institute with artists such as Mario Merz, Sarah Lucas, Paul Neagu and Aleksandra Domanović, before taking over as the first female director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation in 2017. As a foundation established by artists, it is dedicated to the artistic legacy of the two land art pioneers Nancy Holt (1938−2014) and Robert Smithson (1938−1973). The Foundation seeks to explore new avenues at the increasingly relevant interface between art and ecology. The extensive publication Great Women Sculptors, co-edited by Le Feuvre was recently published by Phaidon in collaboration with the Holt/Smithson Foundation. It gathers more than 300 female artists who have been excluded from institutions and the canon based on their gender.

For the preface, Le Feuvre writes: “The ubiquity of objects and experiences makes sculpture profoundly human and acutely powerful as an art form. Sculpture is concerned with bodies, with pushing against and pulling with the space that holds it. It is a situated object –– contingent on circumstances of production, reception and distribution. The following pages underline sculpture as a productive and fertile realm of artistic production, study and engagement that resonates with the ways in which we attempt to order and understand the world that surrounds us. Sculpture is everywhere, but everything is not sculpture. Sculpture can be fleeting, time-bound, contingent, fluid and temporal. It is material and thought, additive and subtractive, autonomous and contingent, permanent and impermanent, temporal and timeless.”

In her lecture, Le Feuvre will talk about these and other qualities, drawing on some key examples from the publication and discussing the relevance of the whole project in highlighting the hugely significant contribution of women sculptors, past and present.

Artists

Participating artists

is a curator, writer, and editor. In 2018 she became inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, the artist foundation dedicated to the legacies of artists Nancy Holt (1938 – 2014) and Robert Smithson (1938 – 1973). From its home base in New Mexico, the Foundation collaborates with artists, writers, thinkers, and institutions to realize exhibitions, publish books, initiate artist commissions, program educational events, encourage research, and develop collections across the world.

Le Feuvre has curated more than seventy exhibitions as an institutional and independent curator, edited over thirty books and journals, spoken at 150 museums and universities across the world, and has published more than 125 essays and interviews with artists. Her 2024 curated exhibitions include For What It’s Worth: Value Systems in Art since 1960 at The Warehouse, Dallas (curated with Thomas Feulmer), Nancy Holt: Circles of Light at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (curated with Clara Meister), and Robert Smithson / Teresita Fernández at SITE SANTA FE (curated with Fernández), and her 2024 publications include the introduction to the compendium Great Women Sculptors ( Phaidon Press) and texts on the artists Anne Hardy, Lucia Pizzani, and Medardo Rosso.

Previously based in the UK, she led the Henry Moore Institute from 2010 through 2017, directed the contemporary art program at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich from 2005 to 2009), was an academic based in the graduate Curatorial Program at Goldsmiths College, and Course Director of the graduate program in Arts Policy and Management at Birkbeck College, University of London.