Conversations with Artists: Joel Shapiro, Thoughts on the Organization of Form in Modern Sculpture

March 2012 - Joel Shapiro, artist. Following the installation of Joel Shapiro's Untitled (1989) in the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden with other major post–World War II sculptures, the artist received an invitation to curate an exhibition of his work alongside the 19th-century sculpture of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. In this podcast recorded on March 9, 2003, Shapiro explains that the upcoming exhibition gave him on opportunity to focus on the continuity of thought in sculpture. Although certain ideas for form in sculpture seem radical and contemporary, their ideas have already been discovered and worked with in earlier times. Shapiro finds that the development of form seems to repeat itself, although it is ever-changing, more or less focused, and contextualized by the era in which it was created.