Bronze Since 1950

In 1952 David Smith opined that iron and steel contained “little art history.” He made this remark in a symposium entitled “The New Sculpture,” which had assembled artists known for favoring industrial metals and unconventional techniques like forging, riveting, and welding. While bronze was part of the “new sculpture,” it also falls outside Smith’s rudimentary schema—bronze has much art history.

Perhaps bronze’s mixed status begins to explain its relatively marginal role in dominant narratives of contemporary art history. Bronze is arguably hard to see when you consider the dominance of steel or the prevalence of found and readymade forms. One could easily mistake that bronze saw the end of its art history in the late twentieth century.

This panel aims to reconsider the place of bronze in contemporary art. Our inquiry will read against the grain of bronze’s oversight, examining case studies that recover dormant histories of bronze work from approximately 1950 to the present. Contributions from all geographies are encouraged, as well as studies that speak to such overarching questions as: What new alloys and fabrication techniques have artists and their collaborators devised since 1950? And how have these changes in materiality and method reshaped the instrumentality of bronze? In what ways have artists since 1950 engaged with the cycle of fabrication, (partial) destruction, and reuse that defines bronze? What biographies of the contemporary bronze object can be derived from the material’s characteristic mutability? How does contemporary bronze work refigure the social and cultural resonances long associated with bronze?