How Renegade Sculptor Judy Pfaff Made a Career Breaking the Rules

Judy Pfaff thought she’d be a painter. She graduated from Yale with an MFA in the discipline in 1973, but she was bored. “Painters didn’t interest me—the way they talked about things,” she told me when I met her in Tribeca, her old stomping grounds, ahead of the opening of her latest solo exhibition in New York.

So she decided to teach herself sculpture instead, guided less by mentors than by curiosity. “I kept buying these funny little books,” she recalled, “like 100 Experiments for the Scientist—books for children about how to do things.” The artist said it reminded her of Mr. Wizard, the TV scientist who turned household experiments into wonder.

When Pfaff moved to a loft on Canal Street in the mid-1970s, she brought that DIY impulse with her. She raided neighborhood hardware stores for wire, plastics, and whatever else caught her eye, conducting experiments of her own. What began as tinkering became a method: She treated each material as a hypothesis about what sculpture could be. Even today, Pfaff’s Hudson Valley studio is a riot of eclectic materials, exploding with colors and industrial scraps that she transforms into maximalist sculptures and installations.

Pfaff, now 79, has become one of America’s most highly regarded sculptors: a MacArthur fellow in 2004, member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2009, and winner of the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. But even with all these accolades, she continues to experiment.

Her latest fixation is neon. Soft, multicolored lights are embedded throughout her new exhibition, “Light Years,” on view at Cristin Tierney in New York through December 20th. The show is her first with the gallery after it began representing her earlier this year, and the first at the gallery’s new space in Tribeca. It features 10 new wall panels, several new wall-mounted sculptures featuring neon, and a monumental sculpture, Travels to Bisnegar (2025), in which a recycled plastic carpet cascades across the wall, hung with fake flowers and shot through with fluorescent neon rods. It’s a bold, luminous turn for an artist who has spent her career pushing color and form into new dimensions.

After finishing at Yale, Pfaff drove down from New Haven to New York in her truck with her dog. She landed in SoHo, finding a 3,000-square-foot place on Canal in a matter of days for $150 a month. Studying painting at Yale had left much to be desired: “You think you’re going to be with brilliant artists. You’re going to have brilliant conversations. Ideas would be just rampant. It was one of the more boring [experiences],” she said, specifically noting that the faculty didn’t give students the time of day. Living in New York became the education she hoped her graduate program would be—a place where she could invent her own way of working.

Pfaff found herself drawn to the expressive work of performance artists like Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Laurie Anderson. During this time, she also formed a lifelong friendship with the abstract painter Al Held, who had been her instructor at Yale. “He and I were very close—until the day he died, actually,” she said. “We sparred all the time about art and things.” Held gave Pfaff her first big break, selecting her for a show at the alternative art hub Artists Space just a year after she arrived in the city. The following year, in 1975, she was included in the Whitney Biennial.

Held also introduced Pfaff to famed dealer Holly Solomon, who began showing Pfaff’s work in 1979. “Holly was a little bit like working for Madonna,” Pfaff said, laughing. “She was über-glamorous. Fun was everything.” Through Solomon, Pfaff found herself in the company of “graffiti kids” and “mischief makers,” as she called them, such as comic book artist Christopher Knowles and downtown experimentalist Gordon Matta-Clark. This rebellious community pushed Pfaff to expand her ideas about artmaking.

By the early 1980s, Pfaff was creating vast, immersive environments comprising bright colors and frenetically placed materials. For instance, in 1980, Holly Solomon staged Pfaff’s Deep Water, an installation that filled the entire gallery with tangled strands of wicker, tree branches, rattan, and wire mesh—like a Wassily Kandinsky composition spilling into space, emerging as a three-dimensional lyrical abstraction. “I was doing stuff that was unbelievably not sellable,” Pfaff said. “And I remember Holly once saying, ‘If I can sell this shit, I will be a great dealer.’”

Pfaff never stopped innovating. She quickly expanded her practice across wall-based constructions and immersive, site-specific installations combining industrial and organic materials. In the early stage of her career, she mounted such installations throughout the United States, from California State University to Gladstone Gallery in New York. Her work was featured again at the Whitney in 1981. The sheer scale and daring materiality of her work won critical acclaim and accolades, including a Guggenheim fellowship in 1983.

Around this time, Pfaff worked in Brooklyn, where she found beauty in the city’s wreckage: Burned-out furniture, twisted metal, and storm-tossed debris became raw material. Once, a 40-foot sign ripped loose by the wind found its way into her work. Though made from industrial parts, these works never forfeited color. “When artists work in black and white, it’s like you cut off 50 percent of what was open for you to do,” she noted.

The chaotic nature of her work was often reflected in her mindset, but the universe often provided solutions. “Sometimes I’d be in tears, wondering how to fix it,” she said. “Then I’d walk out on the sidewalk, and the answer would be tumbling around.”

One noteworthy example of such cosmic timing came in 1994. After completing Cirque, Cirque (1995), a massive commission for the Pennsylvania Convention Center, she realized she had forgotten an upcoming show at Brandeis University—10 days away. Driving north in a snowstorm with a truck full of welding gear and fiberglass, she arrived at an empty, ice-slicked campus. Then, as if on cue, a tree collapsed into a nearby creek, its roots perfectly exposed. “That was it,” she recalled. “We started with that.” The piece, elephant (1995) was improvised into existence.

Five decades into her career, Pfaff remains as restless and inventive as ever. A few years ago, while working on some chandelier pieces, Pfaff turned to neon—a material she had previously avoided because of its cost and fragility. But after a friend introduced her to neon artist Joe Upham, she became obsessed. She eventually invited Upham to set up a workspace in her studio, where he began producing the glowing forms that soon became integral to her installations. Pfaff sees neon as a sort of counterbalance to her loose, intuitive methods. “Neon artists are very tight,” she said with a laugh. “I’m not that.”