Her work is part of prominent corporate and museum collections, including the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Arkansas Art Center, American Museum of Ceramic Art (Pomona, CA), Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN), and Racine Art Museum (Racine, WI), among others.
Stern has contributed as a writer and editor to publications such as Hyperallergic, Art Critical, and ArtSpiel, covering major exhibitions worldwide. She previously served as the principal art critic for The New York Press. Beyond journalism, she has been actively involved in the arts community, serving on the boards of The Children’s Museum of the Arts in NYC and Watershed Center in Maine. From 2008 to 2015, she was also a contributing curator for the Human Rights Film Festival.
As an artist who makes figurative ceramic and mixed media sculptures, I think constantly about the mechanics of the human body: Our weird, outsized torsos, balanced on two legs and tiny feet, asked to do so much each day. The balancing act it takes for us to walk, let alone run, dance, climb, or jump.
My design and engineering process undergoes continual evolution to accommodate my ideas and the materials I’m using. I work like a handyman, cobbling together drawings and sculptures from elements found, borrowed, and imagined. My sculptures are a constant balancing act, both their physical engineering and their marriage of disparate materials, objects, surfaces, and textures. I love the chameleon-like character of clay. Using a wide variety of surface techniques and finishes, I can make it look like almost anything, harmonizing with other found and fabricated materials.
My figures stand awkwardly balanced, like they may tumble at any moment, but they never do. Perhaps a metaphor for the way I move through my life as an artist or the world of flawed but delightful imbalance all around us.
Visit Melissa Stern’s website and Instagram page.
