Vivien Collens
Cornwall on Hudson, NY
Vivien Abrams Collens is a New York artist creating sculpture and public art since 2017, following an earlier focus on painting installations.
Message
Vivien Abrams Collens is an abstract artist whose current practice focuses on large scale site-specific or site responsive sculpture installations. She received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1968 and MFA from Instituto Allende in 1971. She then worked at the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Cleveland Museum of art while beginning her studio practice of constructed paintings and wall installations.
In 1977, after achieving regional recognition for her large relief wall constructions she moved to NYC to find a wider audience for her work. She found that audience in NYC, exhibiting there and elsewhere, and receiving numerous residency fellowships. In 1985 she moved to the Hudson Valley to raise her family and continue her work.
Since learning to weld in 2017 at age 70 during a sculpture residency at Salem Art Works, Collens has created welded sculptures in her studio in Cornwall, NY. Her large scale public sculpture has been exhibited in public sites in cities, sculpture parks and museums.
Statement
For as long as I can remember, I have been driven by a need to build—visually, spatially, and conceptually. My career began in painting in Cleveland and continued in NYC, where my abstract explorations focused on energy. Moving from NYC to the Hudson Valley in 1985 I continued working while I raised my family, enjoying nature and large outdoor spaces. Over the course of my career, my inquiries moved from prints, constructed paintings, and wall installations to large‑scale, site‑specific sculpture and, most recently, to environmental art and wearable sculpture.
Over time forms began to push beyond the surface, becoming dimensional and sculptural, but always on the wall until I created City Blocks, small painted wood sculptures for my Urban Studies exhibition at Gensler's Rockefeller Center Gallery. Seeing them there I decided to plunge into sculpture, and in 2017, at the age of seventy, I learned to weld.
I began fabricating my own sculpture, which I was able to place outdoors. Welding, bending, and assembling metal allows me to fabricate sculptures that feel both architectural and alive, inviting viewers to move through and around them, responsive to the landscapes they inhabit. With public art my work could finally inhabit the scale, presence, and physical dialogue I had always imagined. Now with Storm King Decision, I am paying tribute to the history of the natural environment which at first complimented, and then shaped my large scale public sculpture.