The wonderful artist Alice Mackler passed away peacefully in a hospice in Brooklyn from Covid-related complications on Saturday, January 27th. She was 92 years old.
During the past decade, Alice received abundant recognition from fellow artists for her inimitable sculptures, paintings and drawings, as well as from galleries, museums and collectors. After sixty years of producing art without acknowledgement, Mackler appreciated her late recognition, which fueled a significant body of work that became the passion of her life.
Being a part of the New York art community meant everything to her, especially working at Greenwich House Pottery. Mackler began making ceramic sculptures there in 1998, and continued to do so through late last fall. Although best known for her ceramics, she often described herself as "a painter that does sculpture." And in her triumphant final year, she created more work than ever, and had her 6th solo show at Kerry Schuss Gallery, which opened on November 16th, her birthday.
In the introduction to Mackler's 2020 monograph, Matthew Higgs, curator at White Columns wrote that "a productive -- and paradoxical -- way to approach Mackler might be to think of her as a 'young' artist who just happens to be in her 80's. It is this 'present tense-ness' of Mackler's work -- its vitality and its currency -- that is among its most striking and defining characteristics."
Alice Mackler, born in New York, NY in 1931, began making artwork in high school at the Buxton School in Williamstown, MA, and later attended the Art Students League NY, studying painting with Will Barnett from 1952-54. More than thirty years later, she resumed her arts education and received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1988.
The timing of Mackler's popularity coincides with an expanding art world, more accepting of clay as a medium and of artists who were once on the periphery. In 2023, a ceramic sculpture by Alice Mackler entered the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. A monograph on her work, published in 2020 by CARA, Gregory Miller & Co., and Kerry Schuss Gallery.
Mackler, who prided herself on her sense of style, was recently featured on the cover of apartamento magazine. She was an extraordinary and courageous person, and an artist with an unwavering belief in her own talent. She will be missed very much. A memorial will be held in the near future.
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In 2013, Mackler had her first solo at Kerry Schuss Gallery, New York, NY followed by shows in 2015, 2017, 2018 (with Derek Weisberg) 2021 and 2023. In 2018, kaufmann repetto presented a solo exhibition of her ceramics in Milan. Mackler's work has been included in several museum exhibitions including at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2018) and The Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson (2016). "Unorthodox," a 2015 group show at the Jewish Museum was especially important to her because it included a large group of her sculptures.
Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions in the US and abroad including at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (2023); Shrine, New York (2020); Dorksy Gallery, Long Island City (2018); Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York (2018); The Hole, New York, (2018); Maccarone, New York (2016); White Columns, New York (2016); Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York (2016); Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2015); The Box, Los Angeles (2015); Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York (2014); Warhus Ritterhaus, Cologne, Germany (2014); and James Fuentes Gallery, New York (2013). Additionally, Mackler's sculptures and paintings were shown in solo presentations by Kerry Schuss Gallery at Independent, New York, in 2014, 2019, and 2022.
photo: Alice Mackler at Independent New York, May 2022
Obituary in the New York Times