Wyman Contemporary

COLOSSAL HEADS

ARTIST BIO

Sylvia Schuster’s prolific and brilliant career spans more than six decades of artmaking, beginning at a young age in her hometown of Philadelphia, later in New York City and more recently in the American Midwest.

A scholarship student at both the Rhode Island School of Design and the Cranbrook Academy of Art, two of America’s most prestigious colleges of art, she received a BFA and MFA degree respectively. Her innovative work and protean skills, along with her recognition as a master printmaker, have earned her many fellowships, awards and residencies in numerous museums, colleges, and universities, along with an equal number of exhibitions in museums, galleries and universities.

Not unlike her revolutionary predecessors in Paris at the turn of the 20th century, whose early excitement and interest in African tribal art helped to stimulate the world-wide modernist movement, African imagery has dominated Schuster’s artistic vision throughout her long career and was ignited when, in the early 1960s, she first encountered collections of African tribal art in New York’s Brooklyn and Metropolitan Museums. The power of these works inspired her to seek out African American models and to make countless drawings and collages based upon the beauty and energy she saw in their faces and bodies.

Beginning in her mid ‘20s, with a spectacular group of giant heads, rendered in charcoal, multi-media and collage and often close to six feet in height, they have become a symbolic spearhead of her long and productive career. Over the years these early works have been widely collected and exhibited, and their themes continue to animate Ms. Schuster’s art – a vision that has continued on a smaller scale through many works on paper that also include her stunning oeuvre as a master printmaker.

Schuster’s work speaks for itself, as does her extraordinary curriculum vitae.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and with an early career in New York City, Schuster divides her time between the East Coast and Iowa City. She does printmaking and drawing in Iowa, painting and sculpture in New York. Her work is influenced by African tribal art and by large images like the Stonehenge megaliths, totem poles of the Northwest and Easter Island stone sculptures. She describes her work as “bold and straightforward.”