Faculty Profile

For Jack Squier, sculpting is not an isolated artistic activity taking place in a remote studio, but a process of intellectual growth in the context of a community of creative minds. Teaching at a university like Cornell, Squier says, "is a wonderful arrangement for an artist. It's a busy, productive environment, and there are creative people all over the place. There are excellent musicians, poets, and scientists-making up, more or less, a community probing beyond the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines. There are at least a couple of thousand people on this campus who are seriously interested in the arts."

In accordance with this philosophy of the humanistic grounding of the fine arts, Squier always welcomed to his introductory sculpture classes students not majoring in art, the only prerequisite being that they had a genuine interest in art. The first assignment of the semester would be to create a realistic portrait bust. This is not because Squier believes that all artists should be realists -- on the contrary, Squier himself is primarily an abstract artist -- but because he wanted to challenge students to create a realistic image and, in the process, begin to understand the history of art critically. "I would tell them that to make any sense of the history of Western art they must discover how demanding realism is," he says. To enhance the experience, Squier paired the students off, each student modeling for the other. "This meant there were sixteen different portraits in a typical class, but that became more interesting for me as well." The students not only created a sculpture but also experienced being sculpted. In this way they came to a deeper understanding of the importance of interpretation in realism. There are many lessons to be learned in Squier's first portrait-bust assignment, lessons not simply about broadening one's own artistic capability but also about perceiving the interpretive power of each artist's hand.

• 1949-1951 Instructor, Ogunquit School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine
• 1952 Instructor, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
• 1958 Appointed assistant professor, Cornell University
• 1960 Visiting professor, University of California at Berkeley
• 1965-Present Professor of Sculpture at Cornell University

Solo Exhibitions

• 1956 Alan Gallery, New York City
• 1959 Alan Gallery, New York City
• 1959 A. D. White Museum of Art, Cornell University
• 1962 Alan Gallery, New York City
• 1963 Instituto de Arte Contemporaneo, Lima, Peru
• 1964 Alan Gallery, New York City
• 1964 A. D. White Museum of Art, Cornell University
• 1966 Landau-Alan Gallery, New York City
• 1968 A. D. White Museum of Art, Cornell University
• 1970 Landau-Alan Gallery, New York City
• 1972 Landau-Alan Gallery, New York City

Group Exhibitions

• Addison Gallery, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts
• A. D. White Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
• Alan Gallery, New York City
• Albany Institute of History and Art, New York
• Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
• Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois
• Auschwitz, Poland (competition)
• Boston Arts Festival
• Carnegie Institute (the "International"), Pittsburgh
• Denver Art Museum, Colorado
• Downtown Gallery, New York City
• Grippi Gallery, New York City
• Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca College, New York
• Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
• Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Texas
• Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington
• Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (four "Bi-annuals")
• Landau-Alan Gallery, New York City
• List Art Center, Kirkland College, New York City
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California
• Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art, Utica, New York
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Museum of Modern Art, New York City
• New School for Social Research, New York City
• Pasadena Art Museum, California
• Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
• Saint Lawrence University Museum, New York
• Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri
• Stable Gallery, New York City
• Stanford University Museum, California
• S.U.N.Y. Cortland, New York
• S.U.N.Y. Potsdam Gallery, New York
• Tanager Gallery, New York City
• University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
• Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City (five "Annuals")
• World's Fair, Brussels, Belgium

Public Collections

• Castellani Museum, Niagara University, New York
• Connecticut Conservancy
• Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York
• Fogg Museum, Harvard University
• Hamilton College Museum, New York
• Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
• Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Texas
• Instituto cle Arte Contemporaneo, Lima, Peru
• Ithaca College, New York
• Lipman Foundation, New York City
• Museum of Modern Art, New York City
• Stanford University Museum, California
• Saint Lawrence University Museum, New York
• S.U.N.Y. Potsdam Gallery, New York
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City

• Simply Squier: Professor Jack Squier, M.F.A. '52 (video)