In advance of the end of her two-year exhibition at the Paula Cooper Gallery, The New York Times’ Zoë Lescaze covers Meg Webster MFA ’84 and the transient sculptures that have shaped her career.
Zoe writes,
Unlike many sculptors who spend their careers crafting objects designed to outlast them, Webster has made an uneasy peace with loss. Many of her works exist only when they’re on public display. Constructed in situ, the sculptures that can’t be moved or stored are destroyed and the materials recycled at the end of each show. Although she does make some more stable objects, many of her most significant pieces exist for just a short period of time. Some have been made only once. Others change every time she resurrects them, partly because she uses local materials (the nearest dirt will do), which vary from place to place. In this sense, Webster works more like a performance artist — or a farmer heeding cycles of dormancy and growth — than like a traditional sculptor. She’ll reap a harvest and then let the fields lie fallow.
Webster’s exhibition is on view at the Paula Cooper Gallery until April 13, 2026.
Read more here.
Image credit: The artist Meg Webster, photographed with her work “Stick Spiral” (1986) at Dia Beacon in upstate New York on Feb. 19, 2026. Photograph by Emiliano Granado