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Rona Pondick
Born April 18, 1952
Brooklyn, New York
Nationality American
Education Queens College (BA), Yale University School of Art (Master of Fine Art)
Style sculptor
Awards
  • Anonymous Was a Woman
  • Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship
  • Guggenheim Fellowship

Rona Pondick, born on April 18, 1952, is an American artist who creates sculptures. She lives and works in New York City. Since 1977, Rona has been fascinated by using the human body in her art, both directly and symbolically. She also loves to experiment with many different materials in her sculptures. This interest in materials has been a key part of her artwork from the very beginning until today.

Early Life and Education

Rona grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She studied art at Queens College in New York, earning her first degree in 1974. In 1977, she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. There, she studied sculpture with American artist David Von Schlegell. She also learned from Richard Serra, who was a visiting artist at the time.

Rona Pondick's Art Style

Pondick started showing her art in galleries and museums in the mid-1980s. Since then, her sculptures and special art installations have been displayed all over the world. Her artwork can be divided into two main styles. Her early pieces often used parts or "fragments" that reminded people of the human body. Later, her work focused on combining human bodies with shapes from nature, like plants and animals.

How Color is Used in Her Art

In 2018, art writer Lynn Zelevansky noted how color makes Pondick's newer art feel more friendly and easy to approach. Each of these colorful artworks is named after the colors it contains. Pondick uses primary colors for printing, like magenta, cyan, and yellow. She also adds green, blue, black, and white. These sculptures are made from materials like resin and epoxy. They are partly see-through and can seem to change as the light shifts or as people walk around them. Adding color and new materials has greatly changed how Pondick's art looks and feels.

Head in Tree, 2006-2008
Head in Tree is an example of Pondick's hybrid sculptures. Here, the artist has placed her life-sized head into the center of a tree, made from shiny stainless steel.

Artist's Techniques

Rona Pondick has always used traditional art methods for her sculptures. These include carving, hand-modeling, making molds, and casting metal. Sometimes, she also uses the newest 3D computer technology. She uses computers mainly for making her sculptures bigger or smaller, but sometimes for modeling too. This mix of old and new methods often makes it a mystery how her artworks are created.

Early Work: Body Fragments

Starting in the early 1980s, Pondick created art using pieces that hinted at the human body. These included shoes, baby bottles, and teeth. Critics described these as a "quirky vocabulary of anatomical parts." These early works were sometimes seen as a feminist look at ideas about human desires. They were also described as playful acts designed to make you laugh.

Her very first sculptures from the late 1980s to early 1990s included beds made with pillows, cloth, and wood. Some of these beds had baby bottles tied to them with rope.

Later Work: Hybrid Sculptures

Combining Animals and the Body

Starting in 1998, Pondick began making sculptures that mixed parts of animals and plants with parts of her own body. She usually cast these in bronze or stainless steel. Pondick combined traditional hand-modeling with computer technology to create these unique hybrid sculptures. They often feature her own head and hands.

For example, in her first work in this series, Dog (1998-2001), she combined a human head and hands with the body of a dog. This created a figure that looked a bit like a Sphinx. Other sculptures that mix humans and animals include Cat, Otter, Muskrat, Monkeys, and Ram's Head. Pondick explained, "I use the animal form because it is recognizable and holds its scale no matter where you put it."

Combining Trees and the Body

In 1995, Pondick made her first tree sculpture, which included human teeth scattered on the ground like fruit. Her first sculpture that combined a tree and a human featured her own tiny head as buds on the tree branches. She used aluminum, bronze, and stainless steel for this.

Her first tree-human hybrid sculpture was Pussy Willow Tree in 2001. This was made for a foundation in Annecy, France. After that, the Cranbrook Art Museum asked her to create Crimson Queen Maple in 2003. Then came Head in Tree, made for Sonsbeek International in 2008 and placed in the middle of a pond.

Some of Pondick's later works, like “Magenta Swimming in Yellow” (2015–17), are made from colored resin and acrylic. These sculptures can be both peaceful and strange. The artist makes molds of her own head in bright colors. She then places them on tiny, shrunken bodies, or embeds them in clear blocks of contrasting colors. The results are unusual and interesting moments frozen in time.

Awards and Grants

Rona Pondick has received many awards and grants for her artistic achievements:

  • 2020: American Academy of the Arts and Letters Purchase Award
  • 2016: Anonymous Was a Woman Award
  • 2000: Cultural Department of the City of Salzburg, Kunstlerhaus
  • 1999: Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship
  • 1996: Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship
  • 1992: Guggenheim Fellowship
  • 1991: Mid-Atlantic Arts Grant
  • 1988: Art Matters Inc., New York State Council on the Arts (for Beds installation), Artists Space Grant
  • 1985: Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant
  • 1977: Fannie B. Pardee Prize in Sculpture

Solo Museum Exhibitions

Rona Pondick's art has been featured in many solo exhibitions at museums around the world:

Besides showing her art, she has also given talks at many universities and institutions. These include Yale University, Princeton, Columbia, and even art schools in Israel and France.

International Museum Exhibitions

Pondick's work has been part of major international art shows. These include the Lyon, Venice, and Johannesburg Biennales, the Whitney Biennial, and Sonsbeek.

Museum Collections

Rona Pondick's artwork is held in the collections of many important museums. Some of these include:

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