Syd Carpenter
African American Farms and Gardens
Clay, steel, video projection
Artist statement
Voices and Visionaries provides a unique venue for Philadelphia sculptors. The title signals connection to tangibles and the speculative, both elements critical to my own work. I imagine places I have been and how to translate them into accessible sculptural form. In my case that is portraits of African-American farms and gardens. For me, the Cherry Street Pier offers a complex level of contexts including commerce, the natural world and the intersection of the history of a place and how that place is experienced by diverse populations. Collaborating in this complex space, I am aware of surprising juxtapositions of processes and viewpoints. These should confound and challenge visitors encountering art in a location both familiar and unknown.
About the Artist
Syd Carpenter creates sculpture focusing on the history of African Americans’ relationship to the land. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions across the country and is in numerous public and private collections in the United States and abroad, notably the Metropolitan Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute, the Montreal Art Museum, the James Michener Museum, Fuller Craft Museum, the Tang Museum of Skidmore College, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She is a recipient of fellowships and grants from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Leeway Foundation. Carpenter received her BFA and MFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and is a professor of studio art at Swarthmore College.