You’ve seen his work. It’s the low row of water sprite-like wings on the bridge railing where Main Street spans the Genesee. It’s the upright portal crossed by a see-saw on The Strong National Museum of Play’s grounds, the bouquet of sylvan fronds and weightless festoons in “Soliloquy” on the Memorial Art Gallery’s campus and the golden-spired gates in the MAG atrium. It’s the 110-ton steel and bronze behemoth dubbed “Sentinel” that, at 73-feet tall, dwarfs many of the surrounding buildings at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Albert Paley’s art is part of the living fabric of Rochester, and beyond.
“Everybody thinks of steel as firm and structural,” said Paley. “But when heated and formed, it can become very lyrical. When an individual sees organic forms built out of hard and rigid steel, they are experiencing motion and life — they see one thing and experience something else.”
Part of the earth’s core is molten iron, he noted, and it both grounds us in gravity and keeps us spinning in our cosmic dance.
“The only way to reconcile the two is through paradox,” Paley continued. “I just find that incredibly intriguing, because one doesn’t negate the other. It unifies. And that ability of perception and understanding is a basic part of the human condition.”
He is a philosopher’s artist who, for more than 50 years, has been making work that has embodied the contrast between commonplace and numinous environments. Paley’s gates, monumental sculptures and decorative artworks alike combine highly structured, architectural elements with shapes that immortalize the ephemeral — be it allusions to nature, the sweeping gestures of music and the wind or a nameless emotion frozen in form. His work is soaring, dynamic from all sides, a visual anthem.
After forging his way to international renown, the Rochester-based sculptor, now 81, has greatly downsized his artistic operations in recent years, focusing on the placement of his archive of artworks, papers and entrepreneurial expertise.
And he continues to reap accolades for his achievements.
On April 16, the New Jersey-based International Sculpture Center will honor Paley with the 2025 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award during its annual Night of Excellence celebration at Tribeca Rooftop in New York City. It will be a celebration that represents regional artistic greatness, as Paley shares this year’s distinction with Buffalo-based sculptor Jaume Plensa.
Paley is being recognized not only for his significant contribution to the field of sculpture, but for his generosity of spirit where other artists are concerned, said the International Sculpture Center’s executive director, Johannah Hutchison.
“He has a laudable body of work, an amazing body of work, but he’s also committed to other artists and the community, committed to helping other people understand legacy,” she said. “He’s an incredibly generous and caring individual.”
Preservation of legacy currently occupies a large part of Paley’s time, but not just for his own sake. He aims to leave a well-paved path in that relatively wild territory for other artists to follow. Paley hasn’t really put down his torch; he’s passing it.
But teaching and sharing the wealth of his knowledge have always been fundamental to his life’s work. Paley has a strong and enduring relationship with RIT, where he has been a professor and artist-in-residence at the Schools for American Crafts and Arts and Sciences since 1984. In February, he bequeathed his personal archive to RIT, joining other consequential artists and entrepreneurs in the school’s collections, including artist Milton Glaser, designers Massimo and Lella Vignelli, photojournalist Bernie Boston and businessman Tom Golisano.
The Paley archive includes sketchbooks and documents on creative processes, innovative technology applications, business practices and correspondence, “basically the guts that went into making a piece,” said RIT’s university archivist, Liz Call.
“The archive is his entire ideation realm,” she said. “For every single project he worked on, he was a meticulous, intentioned record-keeper with incredible, comprehensive foresight. There’s layers and layers — I see myriad ways students and researchers can dig into this collection.”
As his archive reflects, Paley describes the development of his artistic practice and the know-how of making it all happen as dual vines, growing in tandem.
“It has to do with self-realization,” he said. “Each one of the works that I would do would be in the present tense of what I was thinking at that time, what I was experiencing in that time, and what I wanted to express, what I learned from that process. That became the basis for the next project, and for the next project. So it’s building an understanding, it’s building a vocabulary, building depth. And so, it’s a continual solution.”
Paley’s work has always required business acumen and connections with professionals who help bring his vision into practical fruition. These have included his close relationships and collaborations with Klein Steel, the Corning Museum of Glass, RIT and other various institutions and cities around the world.
“A lot of these large projects take three to five years to do, with feasibility studies and the design phase, and all of the structural engineering,” he told CITY in a 2017 interview, when he was beginning to wrap up his large-scale work.
In 2020, Paley closed down the largest of his three studios, a 40,000 square-foot space on Lyell Avenue, where he and a team of — at peak — 16 studio assistants forged and fabricated his artwork. Then, he shifted his attention to independent, non-commissioned design.
Paley’s presence around the world is vast. His distinctive, often site-specific sculptures serve as threshold guardians and portals at private residences and public spaces. They are in government and corporate office buildings, on academic campuses, on bridges and at sports stadiums. They’re in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, London’s Victoria and Albert — the list continues to grow as Paley continues the work of finding the right placements for unclaimed pieces from his oeuvre.
Three pillars span the various creative media Paley has worked with: a profound aesthetic appreciation of nature, the balance between the natural and built environments and the human relationship to both.
But he began as a metalsmith, shaping gold and jewels into regal adornments. After he shifted to the landmark sculptural work he is known for, he expanded into furniture design and decorative work (including small sculptures for interiors, tables, lamps, menorahs and more). His art prints bear the same visual language as his sculptures and portray incredible dimensionality despite being works on paper.
These days, Paley is experimenting with verse. He says he’s not ready for his poetic endeavors, which emerged over the past year or so, to meet the public eye. But he feels quickened by the new medium.
“It’s a different vocabulary,” he said. “My work has always come from that intangible place that defies logic. Even though it’s always been non-literal, steel has an edge on it that’s very clear. Words can persuade in a way that tangible, visual reality cannot.” albertpaley.com
Rebecca Rafferty is a contributor to CITY.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
