Ursula von Rydingsvard: A Monumental Legacy in Sculpture

Ursula von Rydingsvard’s Bronze Bowl with Lace (2013) occupies the courtyard of the Princeton University Art Museum. Its vast surface showcases her mastery of form and invites contemplation of the industrial and organic. Carved cedar, cast bronze, raw graphite—these materials were her languages. Von Rydingsvard, who passed away on October 29, 2023, at 80, leaves a legacy measured not only in the metric tons of wood and metal she transformed but also in the dialogues her work continues to provoke.

Born in Deensen, Germany, in 1942 to Ukrainian-Polish parents, von Rydingsvard emigrated to the United States in 1950. Her early life in post-war displaced persons camps shaped her artistic sensibilities, instilling a tactile understanding of resilience. In the 1970s, she began creating monumental sculptures, marking her as one of the few women to disrupt the male-dominated field of large-scale public art. A 1976 exhibition at the Storm King Art Center catalyzed her career, establishing her as a sculptor unafraid to challenge expectations of scale and materiality.

Von Rydingsvard’s preferred medium, cedar, was intentional. Her approach—marking, stacking, fusing—transformed the ordinary into the profound. As curator Patricia C. Phillips wrote in her 2011 essay, “She insists on the seams, the labor, the evidence of process. In a polished art world, her work retains something essential, something lived.” This ethos is evident in works like Ocean Voices (2018), a towering form commissioned for the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Its massive scale belies an intimacy in its details.

The question of scale defines much of von Rydingsvard’s work. Equally significant is her role in shaping the discourse around women in art. The 1980s saw her emerge among feminist artists, though unlike contemporaries such as Judy Chicago, her practice avoided explicit politicization. Instead, she let the material speak for itself, inviting viewer engagement with the physicality of her work. In a 1993 interview with Art Journal, she stated, “I don’t make work about being a woman. I make work as a woman. That distinction matters.”

Her impact extends beyond individual pieces, resonating through institutions and younger generations. Von Rydingsvard’s long association with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, where she developed experimental textiles in the 1990s, exemplified her commitment to interdisciplinary practice. Her presence within permanent collections—including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum—ensures her work remains accessible to scholars and the public.

At auction, her works have crossed the six-figure mark multiple times, with Untitled (Nine Cones) selling at Sotheby’s New York in 2019 for $482,000. Yet, von Rydingsvard was uninterested in the commodification of her practice. Her studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, operated like a workshop, with teams of assistants engaged in labor-intensive carving processes. Anna Bresnick, who managed her studio from 2007 to 2015, described the environment as “monastic, focused. Ursula demanded attention not just to the form but to the gesture of the form.”

That gesture—the indelible mark of her hand—remains central to her artistic philosophy. It distinguishes her from second-wave Minimalists like Donald Judd, whose precision sought to erase the artist’s touch. In contrast, von Rydingsvard’s works are insistently human. Her late-career pivot to bronze deepened this humanity. The meticulous casting process imbued her bronzes with an almost wood-like texture, collapsing the boundary between nature and artifice.

For emerging sculptors—particularly women—von Rydingsvard’s career offers both a roadmap and a challenge. Speaking at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2021, she urged students to “resist polish, resist perfection. The world is not perfect; our work doesn’t need to be either.” This sentiment resonates widely, especially in an era where digital fabrication often prioritizes flawlessness over authenticity.

As the art world mourns her passing, it confronts the vastness of her absence. What does it mean to lose an artist whose work was about presence—about the weight of being and the density of memory? The Princeton installation of Bronze Bowl with Lace feels both elegiac and enduring. It reminds us that von Rydingsvard, even in her absence, remains a monumental force, her works continuing to shape how we see and think about the world.