Alice Aycock
New York, NY
ALICE AYCOCK
Alice Aycock was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1946 and grew up in nearby Camphill. She earned a B.A. from Douglass College and M.A. at Hunter College. Known for installation, land art and sculpture, she has completed many public sculptures throughout the world. In 2014, seven of her large-scale works were installed on Park Avenue in mid-town Manhattan. The impressive late-night winter installation process is included in her video produced by The Artist Profile Archive, along with footage of the installed sculptures on the mall. Her retrospective, Some Stories Are Worth Repeating was first shown at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. It thereafter traveled in two parts to the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2014 where footage for her profile was filmed. She was also interviewed in her studio in New York City where she has been based since 1968.
In addition to her numerous public works, Aycock is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Storm King Art Center, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, and the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany.
“I went to college at Douglass College which was the women’s division of Rutgers University where I got a BA and I got a Masters at Hunter College in New York City. I chose a women’s college because at the time it appeared that the best education for women was within an environment in which they weren’t competing with men for the attention of the teachers. It was never an issue with me. I never wanted to go to a co-ed college. I wanted to be prioritized. I wanted my education to be prioritized. I thought that if I was in a co-ed educational system, at that time in history, that women would be considered less than. They would not be paid attention to in the same way. I aimed only for the Ivy League institutions and Douglass was where I was accepted. I wanted to go to the best women’s college in the Ivy Leagues that was available.”
Alice Aycock - 00:14:27
“I immediately knew that art could be a great deal more than simply a picture of something, that it could be the hot zone, the cauldron of ideas that could be played with and dealt with, that it could really be the center of the intellectual universe…
Everybody has their singular wound, the singular event that marked them, that they’re always trying to come to grips with and happiness is its own reward….all those things that happen in a lifetime, get translated into my work.”
“Most of the work is not literal. I’m not interested in literal references, but I’m very conscious that I’m manipulating sign systems and I’m responsible for that. It isn’t just any old meaning, it’s a very complex arrangement of things…underlying it there’s usually something that says, this feels a little unsettling. I think I did believe that things do have meaning, they just don’t have final meaning…I am constantly assailed by a thousand fictions at any moment.”
