Eva Hesse A’57

Eva Hesse, A’57, was a German-born American artist who had a prolific yet brief career.  A postmodernist, she left a considerable body of drawings and over seventy pieces of sculpture.  She is known for the rigor of her mixed media innovations.  Her work has personal, associative quality, a hint of chance and randomness, and a wry humor that softens its minimal characteristics, the serial order and modular repetition intrinsic to her paintings. After The Cooper Union, she continued her studies at Yale University, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1959.

Hesse taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1968 to 1969, and at Oberlin College in 1968.  Two years after her death, her sculptures and drawings were shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.  Her work is now held in the permanent collections of Oberlin College and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, among others.

Eva Hesse received the 1984 Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award.  She was inducted into the Cooper Union Hall of Fame in 2009