Born in New York City in 1941, Joel Shapiro has explored the possibilities of sculptural form throughout his forty-five-year career. He has executed more than thirty commissions and publicly sited sculptures in major Asian, European and North American cities and has been the subject of more than 160 solo exhibitions and retrospectives internationally including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1982; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1985; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (jointly with the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City), 1995-96; and the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2001.
Shapiro’s work can be found in numerous public collections in the United States and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Tate Gallery, London; IVAM Centre Julio González, Valencia; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.