Editor’s note: Joel Shapiro died June 14, at age 83. In the final weeks of the sculptor’s life, Max Norman interviewed him for a career-spanning profile. What follows are some of Shapiro’s reflections on his storied legacy. This article will also appear in the annual “Icons” issue of Art in America, due out in late August.Alongside the larger sculptures in what turned out to be Joel Shapiro’s last show in New York, at Pace Gallery this past fall, there were a few roughly painted, pin-studded models about the length of your forearm, perched on rectangular white plinths. They shared a room with small insectoid bronzes, so it wasn’t clear whether these wooden models were meant to be read as documents of Shapiro’s process or as its product. But the ambiguity was perhaps the point. “It’s when you’re doing the work that transformation happens,” Shapiro told me in April. “It’s actually physically working with wood, looking at it, cutting it, changing it, altering it, until it somehow satisfies some aspect of your unknown intent.” That’s what attracted him to sculpture in the first place, “It was a fact and a form,” he said.To walk through Shapiro’s Long Island City studio—among the works in various states of undress beneath the lofty ceilings of the ground floor, up to the menagerie of smaller pieces on the third—was to be surrounded by facts and forms. In one sunny corner a branching cactus grew in a pot atop a dolly, held up with an armature of plywood and a green pole. At first glance, I thought it might be a work I’d never seen, or some caprice Shapiro threw together and then abandoned in another of his numerous experiments. It was, in fact, just a cactus.But I wouldn’t have been too surprised, since Shapiro’s long career was sustained by constant inquiry into the most fundamental artistic questions, a kind of sculptural Manhattan Project that left no aspect of his medium unexamined. From gargantuan to Lilliputian and back again, from austerely abstract to cheekily representational, from the floor up onto the wall or onto stilts and then into the air, from senseless just across the threshold to meaning—with unashamed sincerity and unrelenting focus, Shapiro pushed sculpture to new places.He is best known for his sculptures of the human figure, most often fashioned from long rectangles of painted wood or cast bronze, gracefully frozen in a gravitational in-between that tickles your brain and tightens your stomach. He developed not just an unmistakable style but also a signature sculptural language, a syntax of loose connections and obscurely intuitive forms, like the recognizable lines but unfamiliar harmonies of Schoenberg’s music.Very few of his sculptures have titles, but the Pace show was something of an exception. At its heart were three large new works made of wooden volumes covered in fast-drying casein paint, which Shapiro has used on wood and paper since the 1970s. In one corner, the more than eight feet of Splay (2024) splayed back: Two narrow blue rectangles formed a kind of body, and at its base were red and black fins resembling short legs, with a yellow sprout on top joined so loosely as to seem impossibly tangential. It was mirrored, on the other side of the room, by Wave (2024), an eight-foot-tall sculpture whose broad horizontal forms gave it a winglike quality relatively rare in Shapiro’s oeuvre.Between the two hovered the artist’s last masterpiece, which bears the weighty name ARK (2020/2023–24). At more than 18 feet long and nearly 12 feet high, the piece is Shapiro’s biggest wooden sculpture. Yet unlike Splay or Wave, ARK rests on just three tiny points of contact with the ground, as if en pointe. Two enormous rectangles the color of dried blood spelled out its core; nestled behind one was a long narrow turquoise wedge, while two longer, narrower ones extended upward, like masts or feelers. This big sculpture has lots of room for surprises—not least a shock of orange on the internal face of one rectangle, with blue on its narrowest edge.Joel Shapiro: ARK, 2020/2023–24.Photo Jonathan Nesteruk/©2025 Joel Shapiro/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York“The work makes you more aware of your body as your body moves around it,” sculptor Rachel Harrison told me. For the young British artist Jesse Wine, Shapiro “keeps it soft in places and hard in others. It’s almost a type of pacing.”An ark—whether Shapiro’s ARK or the Bible’s—is a vessel of preservation, a means less of conveyance than survival. It’s an uncanny note to end a career on, but a fitting one. Roberta Smith, in a 1982 essay, once suggested that Shapiro, a bit like a latter-day Noah, “helped bring sculpture back from the brink of extinction.” In the sublime but infertile desert of Minimalism, Shapiro saw a path forward for his medium: It would take repurposing sculpture’s past, and his own.SHAPIRO’S STUDIO IS HOUSED in a surprisingly stately former ConEd substation in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge. The situation is apt, and not just because Shapiro, who was born in 1941, grew up just a couple of miles away, in the left-leaning working-class neighborhood of Sunnyside Gardens, Queens. For one, what he described to me as his “first really radical” piece was a diminutive 1973 sculpture of nothing other than a bridge. And Shapiro himself was something of a bridge artist, spanning the Minimalism of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Tony Smith and the Postmodernism that followed. That’s why he is often classified as a Post-Minimalist, a term that describes artists like Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, Lynda Benglis, and Robert Morris, who brought the maker’s process and psychology back into sculpture.It took time, though, for Shapiro to figure out that he could be an artist in the first place. His mother was a microbiologist, and his father a physician who once sewed up Robert G. Thompson, chairman of the New York State Communist Party, after he was stabbed. There was art around the house (African, Indian, Indigenous), and as a kid Shapiro took classes in ceramics, drawing, and painting from a local artist. But up until his graduation from NYU, where he arrived after an abortive year at the University of Colorado Boulder, and then night classes at Queen’s College, it was assumed that Shapiro would follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. “The idea of being an artist didn’t seem possible,” he told art historian Lewis Kachur in 1988, in an oral history for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.Two years in India with the Peace Corps changed that. Following in the footsteps of his sister, who had married an Indian man and lived in Bombay, Shapiro spent 1965 to 1967 teaching gardening techniques in rural areas as part of an effort, begun by Gandhi, to encourage Indians to grow their own food. Stationed in Andhra Pradesh, he traveled widely and made friends with locals and like-minded expats. He was surrounded too by sacred Indian sculpture, whose dense designs and endless variations on the human form he photographed on tours across the country. The experience “heightened my sense of the hugeness and variety of life in general, but also the possibility of actually becoming an artist became very real to me for the first time,” Shapiro reflected in 2007.Back in New York, Shapiro talked his way into the MFA program at NYU and started working in earnest. He also married Amy Snider, the founder of Pratt’s Art and Design Education department; the two had a daughter, Ivy, now an art adviser. To support the family, Shapiro worked polishing silver for a then-decent $3.25 per hour at the Jewish Museum, at the time, a radical force in New York, having mounted “Primary Structures,” the first real institutional show of Minimalism, in 1966. Brice Marden and Mel Bochner worked there as guards.In his studio, then downtown, Shapiro went through “an idea a week.” These experiments first became public when Marcia Tucker selected a piece for the Whitney’s 1969 “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Material” show: a five-foot square of dyed nylon monofilament stapled to the wall. (After the show, Tucker wrote, the piece “becomes an art corpse set to rest in a plastic bag in a corner of the artist’s studio.”) The monofilaments, which he made for about a year and a half, “had an intensity and … a sensual aspect that was peculiar,” Shapiro told me.In the late ’60s and early ’70s, he created a series of paintings (one now in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection), made only of messy grids of repeated impressions of the artist’s thumb. In 1970, for his first solo show at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Shapiro installed small wooden shelves in a straight line across two adjacent walls. (Shapiro moved to Pace in 1992.) On each shelf rested an identically proportioned rectangle of different materials—steel, plaster, gum rubber, Homasote wall board, and copper. With his thumbprint paintings, he had isolated the most basic gesture of painting: mark-making. The shelf works similarly isolated the most basic gesture of sculpture: the presentation of material to be read by the viewer.For his next show, in 1972, Shapiro produced process works like One Hand Forming (1971), a stack of sausage-shaped clay cylinders formed with one hand, and Two Hands Forming (1971), balls of clay formed with both hands arranged à la Hesse in round groups on the floor. 75 lbs. (1970), in a clear nod to Andre, juxtaposed 75 pounds of magnesium and 75 pounds of lead; the latter form was, true to its material, much smaller. Looking back, Shapiro reflected that he was “basically figuring out where something, at least for me, became more than a pile and had some real intent or purpose.”These works shared the Minimalists’ ambition to isolate what Judd called the “specific object,” devoid of reference to anything beyond itself. Yet they bore what Judd sought to banish: the literal mark of their maker. Beneath the surface, they also reflected Shapiro’s exposure to craft in India, where he had taught locals to build ovens out of clay, and once recalled observing “cow dung patties on the wall, conic displays of pigment and spice… endless rolls of fabric. All raw material.” A 1970 photograph of Shapiro’s worktable—strewn with pieces of hammered copper, balls of clay, and stacks of river-rock-like lozenges—could easily be mistaken for a disorganized display in an anthropological museum. “His works of this period [the 1970s] exude emotions as vehement as a child’s fears combined with something akin to the austere discipline of a scientist,” Peter Schjeldahl wrote in 1993.Joel Shapiro: Chair, 1973-74.Photo Geoffrey Clements/©2025 Joel Shapiro/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkIt was these vehement emotions and a child’s fears that seem to have pushed Shapiro away from conceptual questions and toward an intensely personal figuration. The pieces in Shapiro’s 1973 show at Alanna Heiss’s Clocktower Gallery in New York are viscerally affecting, coming just after the dissolution of Shapiro’s marriage to Snider the year before. The centerpiece was Bridge (1973), a simple milled cast-iron structure just 3½ inches tall. (It superseded a balsa wood version shown earlier that year in a group show at Paula Cooper.) The bridge was displayed by itself, marooned on the vast floor beneath a high ceiling. In the same show, an 11-inch-tall ladder leaned against the wall and two rough birdlike shapes, formed in clay by Shapiro’s right and left hands and then cast in bronze, rested on a shelf at waist height. The following year, again at the Clocktower, a mangled drawing mannequin splayed in one corner, right by the scuffed baseboard—a disturbing work critics immediately linked to Giacometti’s chilling bronze Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932). Around the same time, Shapiro produced a three-inch-tall chair in bronze (it “looks as if it were conceived by Gerrit Rietveld for a dollhouse designed by Plato,” Robert Pincus-Witten, who coined the term “Post-Minimalism,” once quipped) and, perhaps most iconic of all, a five-inch-tall cast-iron polygon that resembled a house.“There were all these prohibitions about representation and anything that had reference,” Shapiro said of the art world’s attitude at the time. He didn’t care. These figures “were a record of my emotion, of my anxiety.” Indirectly, they may have reflected his sense of powerlessness; directly, of course, they represented home, and his role as creator of more than just art. “I was also building doll furniture for my daughter,” the artist remembered. “All of a sudden I’m looking at this three-inch chair on the floor and it does something spatially on the floor that I hadn’t seen. That really engaged me. It seemed like a real place to go.”The simple fact of these sculptures’ smallness—the opposite of the maximalist scale favored by the likes of Morris, Serra, and Tony Smith—was profound. Had they been larger, they would have lost their power. “It was dragging you into this interior, almost ‘Alice in Wonderland’ stuff,” Shapiro observed. “I wanted them in your space.” These works were intimate but nonetheless impersonal, imbued with equal parts pathos and irony. “If these sculptures locate the contents of memory within a public space,” Rosalind Krauss wrote in 1976, “it is in order to show that the privacy of our memories is what is most trivial about them.”Beginning in the mid-’70s, forms like chairs, stools, boxes, houses, birds, horses, and even coffins were rendered so elementally as to hover between figuration and abstraction. Teasing the plinth—considered, like cast iron, retrograde at the time—Shapiro mounted houses on small shelves or on tabletops. In one of the most famous iterations, from 1974, he mounted a small rectangular house, cast in bronze (and with a gently sloped roof whose angle he lifted from the helmet of Donatello’s David), on a narrow bronze shelf that protruded about two and a half feet and then dropped down at 90 degrees, a physical embodiment of the sightline—and the out-of-sightline. These pieces still exert a mysterious force, like Etruscan funerary objects or Cycladic figurines, evoking the near past of our own childhood and, somehow, childhood itself. Our desire to read these stubbornly suggestive shapes is as innate and reflexive as the desire to make sense of our inchoate feelings, to love the family that wounds us.Some of the forms were themselves wounded: Shapiro made a series of small, hollow rectangular volumes with apertures of various sizes; most were orthogonal, but some were organic, more abrasions than openings. It was one of these that Antony Gormley saw in 1980, on a formative visit to the Panza collection in Varese, Italy. “Here was something that immediately by inference engaged your body,” he recalled to me. “They referred to shelter, the human need for habitat, but without overplaying it.” Gormley—who also spent time in India, and who made his debut at London’s Whitechapel Gallery a year after Shapiro made his in 1980—views this early work of Shapiro’s as “playing with Minimalism while making one very aware of what Minimalism has declined to engage with.” It was a “really useful irritant.”Joel Shapiro: Untitled, 1980, at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.©2025 Joel Shapiro/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkSHAPIRO HAD FLIRTED with the human form from the beginning, with the mannequins strewn in corners. But his now instantly recognizable manner of representing bodies took root in the second half of the 1970s. In 1976 Shapiro cast in bronze what looks like a fallen bough, with a pair of limbs stemming from a slightly thicker rectangular trunk; one was bent into a kind of knee, the other extended straight. Both divide, like wishbones, into two smaller branches. That was the same year his sister died by suicide. “I was looking at trees, trying to find some image that might convey that,” he told me. The bronze tree “was very much about her.”Around the same time, he cast in bronze a nine-inch-tall running man and, defying another Minimalist taboo, painted it in stripes of black and red—a color here reminiscent of Rodchenko’s Constructivism, which the body’s rectangular figure evokes. Experiments ensued, with mannequins posed like caryatids and with sitting, lying, and crouching figures. But he found his stride—or his balance—in 1980, with a figure made of four-by-fours straight from the lumber yard leaning forward on one “leg,” as if frozen on its way to a yoga pose, or halted mid-trip. On one “arm,” a sawmill’s stamp is still visible, like a tattoo.In the decade that followed, Shapiro’s work was “figurative with a vengeance,” as Schjeldahl put it. Crucially, almost all of it stood vertically in space instead of lying on the floor. “Somehow the ground, the wall, the table, they became a frame,” he remembered.After working beneath the weight of so much grief in the ’70s, Shapiro’s work was literally elevated by “a kind of enthusiasm,” tending increasingly vertical. Even the floor works from the decade, which include fragmentary figures (a rectangular “torso” sometimes with just a “head”) cast in iron, or made from wood or plaster, reach up into space, or lift themselves up as far as they can. Around 1980, he began mounting small, brightly colored reliefs on the wall. By the end of the decade, he was elevating volumes on long dowels, like spider crabs, and hoisting forms on poles.Joel Shapiro: Untitled, 1996-99, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Photo Ellen Page Wilson/©2025 Joel Shapiro/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkThese sculptures, whatever their form, are decidedly off-kilter, “sidestepping all of the hubris that has marked all of sculpture in the Western canon,” as Gormley observed. Shapiro tapped back into sculpture’s tradition of figuration, but slantwise, making light of what might otherwise have been monumental. He drew inspiration from Degas, whose sculpture, he once said, “is so refined and elegant in his projection of form into space, whereas Rodin builds from the ground up.” And while he employed materials—beams in bronze or wood or aluminum—evocative of industrial modernity, he made all the heaviness seem light. His bronze and iron casts often preserve the grain of their wooden molds, even the traces of the saw. Metal makes for permanence, but not always perfection.By the 1990s, Shapiro was experimenting regularly with doubling bodies, seeing how, in combination, they come even closer to abstraction. And his work scaled up with time, as he received ever more public commissions. Among the most important was Loss and Regeneration (1993), a monumental installation on the steps of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., comprising a 25-foot-tall figure that seems to plunge earthward, its head down and a long arm extended into the air, and, some 40 feet away, a nine-foot-tall house poised, like a dreidel, on one corner of its roof.Joel Shapiro: Loss and Regeneration, 1993, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.Photo Wojtek NaczasCatastrophe worked strange magic on Shapiro. Divorce, grief, a world-historical tragedy that haunted his secular Jewish upbringing—all stimulated his art. And so it was one morning as he was in a cab on his way to the Newark airport, when his second wife, painter Ellen Phelan, called to tell him that a plane had collided with the North Tower of the World Trade Center.In the years following 9/11, Shapiro’s geometric compositions became increasingly complex and contingently joined. He began breaking up models and recombining them into dynamic and unstable forms, strung together and suspended with metal wire that had all the jumbled eloquence of rubble. (It figures that a sculptor would see the collapse of the Twin Towers a bit differently from the average New Yorker.) In the wake of that event, Shapiro “recognized—it’s a harsh thing to say—the limitation of what I was doing previously,” he said. The trauma worked to “push my work beyond a kind of representation,” to study “collapse and joining.”His fragile, mobile-like assemblages begun in the 2000s look back to two of Shapiro’s long-standing influences, Calder and Miró, whose lightness is often subtended by darkness. But they also point to where Shapiro would go in the coming decades.IF SHAPIRO’S FIGURES linger in the rich limbo of balance, in the 2000s, he burrowed into the density of contraction and collapse. A high point came in 20 Elements (2004–05), an 11-foot-tall, 7-foot-wide, 10-foot-long cluster of 20 brightly painted wooden rectangles, commissioned by the Musée d’Orsay, that responds to Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Dance (1865–69), a virtuosic academic relief originally intended to adorn the facade of the Paris Opera. (A study for the piece was on one of the models on display at Pace.) Mirroring the central, leaping figure in Dance, the heart of Shapiro’s composition is a large yellow rectangle, which he characteristically lofted at a diagonal. Responding to the dynamism of Carpeaux’s sculpture, none of the 20 elements is joined along an edge but instead seem to be magnetized to some core. This refusal to let the shape of the volume dictate its mode of connection to other shapes—a hallmark of Shapiro’s later style—is of a piece with his desire to resist the ways architecture could wind up framing, even constituting, so much of Minimalist sculpture.Shapiro then “overwhelmed the architecture” altogether in the central piece in his 2010 show at Pace, Was Blue (2010), composed of 12 painted rectangles, in various dimensions and in an unusually subdued palette, suspended with taut fishing wire as if in antigravity. “Of course they were dependent on the wall and floor,” Shapiro said, “but they weren’t organized around it.” In a 2016 show at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Shapiro suspended irregular polygons, including two in crimson that resembled houses, echoing a volume in a dark-blue sculpture that sat on the floor below. This work represented a “real sense of abandon,” he said. If his sculptures had always insisted on being viewed in the round, these new installations compelled the to move through them, within them—what Andre called “sculpture as place.”Installation view of “Joel Shapiro: Out of the Blue” at Pace Gallery, New York, in 2024.Photo Jonathan Nesteruk“I’VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO DRAW,” Shapiro told me. But that’s not exactly true: He often sketched forms that eventually turned into sculptures, and even scribbled a series of unsettling etchings in the mid-’70s of couples dancing, or fighting, or both. Shapiro produced numerous drawings in charcoal and pastels, plus gouaches and woodblock prints, many of which reflect his sculptural preoccupations.In the ’80s, he drew geometric forms in smudgy black charcoal on white paper—like blueprints for his houses, or X-rays of his stick men. (These bracing monochromatic pieces clearly left a mark on Christopher Wool, who served as Shapiro’s assistant for several years in the early ’80s. “His work is something I still think about all the time,” Wool told me.) Shapiro made blobby gouaches in bright colors around the time he started putting small, bright sculptures on the walls. He also started making collages, and collage-like geometric patterns, just as his sculptures themselves began to work more through juxtaposition than straightforward joining.In his final years, Shapiro rapidly assembled pieces of wood using epoxy resin and one-inch pins shot out of a chunky, green-enameled pneumatic gun, made by the Italian company Omer. It was a kind of drawing in three dimensions, not so far removed from playing with blocks. “Even if it’s miserable, it’s playful,” Shapiro told me. To make ARK, for example, “I remember jamming pieces of wood into the vice, and compressing them,” he said. “I wanted layers of compression.” At some point, Shapiro’s longtime carpenter, Ichiro Kato—who got his start manufacturing Donald Judd’s furniture—might translate a model into a finer maquette, which would then be translated once again when Shapiro chose to produce a piece at scale. In this iterative process, which sometimes unfolded over years, composition and contingency blended together. A sculpture might be transformed when a model got knocked over or fell apart; scrap snatched up from the floor might look like an invitation.At the end of our meandering conversation, Shapiro and I spoke about two of his most towering predecessors, the totemic David Smith and the somewhat more puckish Anthony Caro. “I think David Smith really had to prove he was an artist in some way,” Shapiro said. “Caro not quite as much.”I asked him if he still felt that he had something to prove. “I still think I do,” he replied. “But I think at this point I can be light-handed,” he added. “I think that’s a privilege of years.”