In a city better known for its industrial past than its artistic present, Sculpture Space has steadily been reshaping the cultural landscape of Central New York. The nonprofit, which has supported over 700 sculptors since its founding in 1976, has recently taken a bold step toward deepening its impact with a long-term residency program that prioritizes sustained, research-driven artistic exploration.
Now in its third year, the program has announced its 2025 Long-Term Resident: Jennifer Leibowitz, an interdisciplinary sculptor and thinker whose work spans mythology, geologic time, and the tension between analog ritual and digital memory. With support from Pratt Munson College of Art & Design and The Community Foundation of Herkimer and Oneida Counties, the nine-month residency offers not only studio space and housing, but also a unique opportunity to collaborate with local students, engage with the public, and contribute meaningfully to a region in artistic flux.
Leibowitz, a recent MFA graduate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, brings a distinctly literary sensibility to her sculptural work. Drawing inspiration from classical texts, speculative cosmologies, and forgotten rites, her constructions often resemble relics from an unnamed civilization—one whose stories are embedded in pigment, sap, bronze, and silence.
“I’m interested in the rituals we no longer understand,” Leibowitz said in a recent interview. “The way language degrades over time. The myths that turn into metaphors, and then into matter.”
Her selection follows the 2023–24 residency of Nneka Kai, an Atlanta-born artist whose practice centers on Black identity, historical textile traditions, and the performance of everyday gestures. The current resident 2024-25, Jeff Gibbons, known for his blend of the personal and the political, is in the final stretch of his own term. Gibbons, who hails from Detroit by way of Dallas, has used his time in Utica to continue a practice that often renders the ordinary uncanny, transforming found objects into poetic meditations on labor, memory, and loss.
Each of these artists marks a distinct chapter in a larger vision being realized by Sculpture Space Executive Director Tom Montan, who sees the long-term residency as a generative counterpoint to the rapid, transactional pace of contemporary art.
“Jennifer is an artist whose work doesn’t just ask questions—it dwells in them,” Montan said. “Her process is rigorous, almost alchemical, and her commitment to craft and inquiry resonates deeply with what we’re trying to cultivate here: a space for art that evolves slowly and leaves a mark.”
Leibowitz’s background—ranging from engineering work in Portland, Oregon, to teaching foundry techniques at SAIC—has lent her a multidisciplinary approach that blurs the boundary between sculpture, storytelling, and science. In Utica, she will develop a new body of work while contributing to studio courses at Pratt Munson and engaging the broader community through workshops and public programs.
In an era when residencies increasingly function as brief stops on the itineraries of overextended artists, Sculpture Space’s long-term model offers something more rare: time, depth, and rootedness. For Leibowitz—and for the city of Utica—it’s a chance to slow down, dig deep, and see what emerges.
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