Judy Pfaff, American (b. 1946)

Judy Pfaff is best known for her sculptures and installation art, but her work has always questioned the boundaries between drawing and sculpture with her imaginative and animated use of line. If her three-dimensional works play with the idea of line to create volume and movement, so too do her two-dimensional drawings, paintings, and prints. Pfaff’s signature quality is controlled chaos—the reining in of many distinct elements into a harmonious whole.

Born in Britain, Pfaff came to the United States to study art. She earned her B.F.A. at Washington University, Missouri, in 1971 and her M.F.A. from Yale in 1973. She has shown her work at major museums worldwide, was the U.S. representative to the 1998 Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil, and is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. among others. She is professor of art at Bard College in New York.