Judith Shea
American sculptor and artist (born 1948)
Judith Shea is an American sculptor and artist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1948. She was awarded a degree in fashion design from the Parsons School of Design in 1969 and earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree there in 1975. This dual education formed the basis for her figure based works.
Her career has had three distinct phases: the use of cloth and clothing forms from 1974 to 1981; the use of hollow cast metal clothing-figure forms from 1982 until 1991; and the creation of carved full-figure statues made of wood, cloth, clay, foam and hair from 1990 to the present.
About
Her first New York City presentation was at Alanna Heiss's CLOCKTOWER galleries Project Room in April 1976. In a performance based on color theory, she made a full spectrum of sheer silk shirts and pants. Dancer Juliette Shen, changing clothes at Shea's direction, added and subtracted layers, mixing new colors live in the transparent silk. There were five performances over three days. Her work then traveled the country, appearing in museum and art festival exhibits. In the January 1981 Whitney Biennial, Shea showed three simple forms hung on the wall that evoked iconic clothes of her childhood years; a black overcoat, "I LIKE IKE", and 2 simple sheath dresses, "INAUGURAL BALL" and "EXEC. SEC'Y.".
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6303669. VIAF identifies the subject as 27870335. The Library of Congress control number is n88014471. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1969, 1975 and 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Judith Shea” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.