Works on view
Watch & Listen
In the summer of 1991, LeDray layed out nearly six hundred miniature objects on a sidewalk in the center of New York’s Astor Place for the first installation of workworkworkworkwork.
Over the past twenty years, New York-based sculptor Charles LeDray (b. 1960, Seattle) has created a highly distinctive and powerful body of work using such materials as sewn cloth, carved human bone, and glazed ceramics. This major survey, which includes works from the 1980s to the present, celebrates both the artist’s virtuosity with materials and his uncanny manipulation of scale to create seemingly familiar objects that engage the collective memory. His techniques of sewing, carving bone, and throwing clay pots find precedents in the traditions of folk art and visionary art, yet rise to a level of unprecedented virtuosity and artistic invention. The exhibition is curated by Randi Hopkins for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Its Whitney installation will be overseen by curator Carter Foster.
In the News
Review: “His magical retrospective … is dumbfounding. That one man could have singlehandedly created all these things defies credibility.”
—The New York Times
Review: “Some of the richest, most touching and witty art I have seen in a long while”
—The Financial Times
“an enthralling, meticulous solo show”
—WNYC Culture Blog
