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07/13/2016 08:30 AMSculptor Shelby Head, a Madison resident who moved here from San Francisco 24 years ago, left her position as an art teacher at Hyde School in North Haven at the end of June to focus on her sculpture—and launch the School for Visual Art, offering private and small group art instruction for all ages.
When asked to define a sculptor, since many people might picture a potter at the wheel spinning clay into a vase or pot, Shelby grows animated.
“I have to tell you, one of the most exciting things about contemporary art is anything goes, anything. To me, the more you think outside the box, the more interesting the work is. I’m looking at my seltzer bottle right here. You can take 100 seltzer cans and make a sculpture out of it. Sculpture can virtually be anything. Right now I’m working with paper. I’ve worked a lot with paper. Anything that’s three dimensional, anything you can walk around, is sculpture. You can use sneakers, you can use everything and anything. There are just unlimited possibilities for sculpture. For a long time, sculpture was bronze, clay, very traditional, using the object as subject, but now it can be just a concept. Art is honestly everything and anything.”
Shelby has been a professional sculptor since the 1980s. She earned an MA in Art at Adams State University in Colorado and studied sculpture in the MFA program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She worked as a professional mold-maker and wax technician for several art foundries in New Mexico and as a wax technician for world-renowned sculptor Tom Otterness.
She built models and oversaw model-makers for stop-motion animated TV commercials and music videos in New York City. She is currently represented by the Fernando Luis Alvarez Gallery in Stamford.
Her work was featured in the inaugural edition of CONTEXT New York in May in Manhattan and at the 2016 Art Palm Beach Art Fair this past January.
“I am in a position where I do not have to teach full-time, and I want to focus on my professional life as a sculptor,” Shelby says. “I love teaching, so I wanted to keep my hand in that, but I don’t need to do it full-time, I just need to do it part-time. So it’s just a way to keep my hand in teaching.”
Shelby got into sculpting in her teens.
“I want to say I was about 13,” she recalls. “I just have this memory of going into the woods and putting an assemblage together of found objects. Then I started to hang out in the art department when I went to college, and I ended up in the art department more so than in any other department just because I wanted to learn how to weld. I was very interested in building.”
Shelby moved to Madison “to raise kids,” she says. “That was the sole purpose for finding a really good, safe, community with good education. I’ve been here so long, I fell in love, and will probably stay for life.”
Shelby’s daughter, Molly, is 26 and lives in Boston, working as a manager at Athena Health.
“She’s engaged to be married; I’m very excited,” Shelby says.
Her son, Max, is 21 and was just accepted into the master’s program at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
She and her family may have lived in major cities on both coasts, but Shelby hasn’t left her heart in San Francisco.
“What I love about Madison is it’s quiet,” she says. “I live in the woods and it just gives me time and space to work on art. It’s my passion; it’s what I do. I have a very good, small network of friends. I’m fortunate enough to have a studio in my home.”
As of the beginning of the month, Shelby was the only teacher and had no students enrolled yet, but she knows it’s only a matter of time.
“I think it just takes one student and then word of mouth,” she comments. “I would love to expand the business—right now it’s me and I have two other people in mind [to teach] that are also professional artists. I want there to be a level of professionalism in it, with professional artists teaching. I think art is a serious study, but if someone just wants to play, it’s that, too.”
Shelby has a stable of artists who inspire her, including Josef Albers from Yale as well as Sarah Sze, Doris Salcedo, and Frank Stella.
“Frank has a series around music,” Shelby says. “I’m a huge jazz fan; music plays a lot into my work. I love jazz, blues, punk, alternative rock, country, anything that’s good musically I like. I play the saxophone and I learned music theory because I wanted to incorporate elements of music into my work. I did a couple of installations that were based on the ‘A A B A’ song format of bebop jazz. I took the small ensemble idea of jazz, and I had the four elements that I introduced into it to represent the four different instruments. It was an installation that moved all over the room.”
Shelby expounds upon the relationship between art and music.
“At the turn of the century, early 1900s, when artists were breaking away from representational work, they went to music for ideas—’How did musicians who aren’t visual come up with music theory? What is it that made music music?’—and they incorporated those ideas into abstract art. That’s part of what makes abstract art cohesive, in my opinion. So it’s a very, very old idea, actually. Visual artists have looked to music and musicians have looked to visual art. To me they’re interchangeable.”
Shelby can’t wait to share her knowledge and experience with her art students.
“What I love about teaching is the creative process, that really matters a lot to me, and it has to be taught also,” she says. “Especially in school systems, I think we tend to squelch it, and to me it’s the innovation and creative sense of the world that makes life worth living. I just love that piece of what I can bring as a teacher and as an artist, and that translates into everything else that you do.”
Visit Shelby’s website at www.shelbyhead.com. To learn more about the School for Visual Art, visit www.schoolforvisualart.com.