The Long Island Museum welcomes two new sculptures
By Heidi Sutton
They say two heads are better than one. How about two really BIG heads?
Two sculptures by artist Philip Grausman were unveiled on the grounds of the Long Island Museum (LIM) in Stony Brook last week. Grausman’s “Eileen,” 1993-1996, fiberglass, 10 feet high by 7.5 feet wide by 9 feet deep; and “Victoria,” 1999-2000, fiberglass, 14 feet high by 6.5 feet wide by 7.5 feet deep, will call the LIM home for a two year loan.
“The museum is thrilled to be able to bring fresh new art to our grounds, something for our visitors to enjoy and also something new to take in by the thousands of people who drive by our campus daily on Route 25A. Philip Grausman was prioritized as a great American figurative sculptor that we have wanted to work with for years, so we are so pleased to make this dream a reality. Budco Enterprises, Inc., from Hauppauge, donated their expertise and talent and did an amazing job installing these pieces,” said Long Island Museum’s Deputy Director Joshua Ruff.
Grausman’s earliest sculptures represented germinating buds and seeds, and this eventually led him to explore the underlying structure and form of the human head. A student of José Mariano de Creeft, a renowned sculptor of female heads and figurative forms, he trained at the Art Students League of New York and received his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.
Grausman has participated in over 80 solo and group exhibitions at prestigious venues throughout the world and his work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT.
His artist statement reads, “Since the early 1980’s, I have completed a number of monumentally scaled sculptures inspired from portrait heads originally modeled from life. These large-scaled heads are not portraits in a conventional sense. Rather, I view them as landscapes, an association expressed through a shared sense of scale. Fiberglass allows me to create and exhibit on a large scale. The whiteness of the forms appeals to me and suggests a drawing experience where the white page is transformed by line and contour. Creating each portrait sculpture is like sight-reading an unfamiliar musical score. It is the hidden geometry and interlocking volumes that inspire me.”
You can visit these impressive sculptures and others on the museum’s sprawling 9-acre campus at 1200 Route 25A, Stony Brook Thursdays through Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. For more information, visit www. longislandmuseum.org.
