Meredith Bergmann A’77 has been making sculpture for 40 years that deals with complex themes in an accessible, beautiful, and provocative way. Working within the tradition of narrative sculpture, she draws on her love of the history of art, literature, and mythology to make the past speak to the present.
Her private works often involve visual and verbal puns. Her sculptures evoke many-layered responses, blending the sensuality and power of traditional sculpture with her own sense of mischief.
Meredith works both on public monuments and on a private scale, exploring issues of history, race, human rights, disabilities, and the power of poetry and music. Her sculpture has been shown in more than two dozen exhibitions and is in 10 institutional collections. Her largest public commission is the Boston Women’s Memorial on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston’s Back Bay, unveiled in 2003.
Her bronze Memorial to September 11th was installed in New York City’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 2012. She is currently creating the FDR Hope Memorial for Roosevelt Island, NYC, and the Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Woman Suffrage Movement Monument for NYC’s Central Park.
Meredith has worked as Production Designer on five feature films. Her articles, essays, reviews and poems have appeared in anthologies and many journals, including The American Arts Quarterly, Barrow Street, Contemporary Poetry Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, The New Criterion, The New York Review of Art, The Tri Quarterly Review, and Sculpture Review. She was poetry editor of The American Arts Quarterly from 2006-2017, and her chapbook, A Special Education, was published in 2014 by EXOT Books.
Meredith lives in Connecticut with her husband, a writer and director, and their son.
Nick Capasso, director of the Fitchburg Art Museum describes Meredith this way:
“As a contemporary artist, Meredith Bergmann relies on her knowledge of history and art history, as well as her considerable talent as a figurative sculptor, to forge enriching links between the past and the concerns of the present. Her success as a creator of public art stems from her ability to make free, imaginative use of the forms and symbols of traditional sculpture to address, in complex yet accessible ways, the multi-layered personal and societal concerns of modern life.”
Donald Kuspit, “Public Memory and Social Conscience” American Arts Quarterly, 2012, Vol. 29 no. 3:
“The figures (Bergmann) represents are individualists who made a historical difference. She consummately realizes them, both by way of her extraordinary attention to detail–perhaps most conspicuously evident in the hands that “hold” her Urn (2006)–and the larger than life authority of many of her figures. …she gives them a kind of transcendental grandeur that confirms that they transcended the social conditions into which they were born. The sturdiness and solidity of her figures… and the sense of pent-up force concentrated in them suggest their strength of character, giving them the ability to survive and hold their own and make them all the more uncannily present–like a persisting memory.”
Harriet Senie, art historian and juror for Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Woman Suffrage Movement Monument:
“Meredith Bergmann has accomplished something that seems to me unique. She has seamlessly expanded the definition of a monument to consist of recognizable portraits; significant and legible texts; and an invitation to viewers to participate in the essence of democracy – the right to vote. This conflation of elements and the expansive narrative it conveys suggests to me at the very least a new model for memorials, and perhaps even a new paradigm.”
Awards:
Meredith Bergmann A’77 will receive the Cooper Union Alumni Association Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award in May 2019 and will be inducted into The Cooper Union Hall of Fame at that time. She received the
Edith H. and Richman Proskauer Prize from the National Sculpture Society in October 2017.
Other Links
Meredith Bergmann Public Commissions, Link
NYC Celeb Sculptress to Speak in Ridgefield,Meredith Bergmann is creating the first statues of real women in NYC’S Central Park. Patch Network November 12, 2018. Link
Sculptor chosen to design the first statues of real women in Central Park, New York Daily News, New York. 7/19/2018. Link
In the Studio: Meredith Bergmann, Allison Malafronte, Newington Crospy Cultural Studies Center Website. March 2017.
MEREDITH BERGMANN A’77, The Cooper Union Alumni Association Newsletter, December 2013. Link
Meredith Bergmann A’77 chosen to create Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Woman Suffrage Movement Monument,
The Cooper Union Alumni Association Newsletter, Fall 2018. Link