Biography

Ward Shelley maintains studios in Brooklyn, NY, as well as Connecticut and Florida. He earned his Masters degree from NYU.

He specializes in large projects that freely mix sculpture, architecture, and performance. Utilizing eclectic influences and a variety of media, Shelley’s installations include eccentric functioning architectural pieces in which he lives and works during an exhibition monitored with live surveillance video equipment.

Shelley works with culture-related subjects in his Archive/Library series of immersive installations and his celebrated diagramatic timeline paintings, which cover diverse themes such as the careers of artists working in de-materialized media and the history of art scenes. The best known of these are the Williamsburg Timeline Drawing and Downtown Body, published by Bomb Magazine.

Shelley has exhibited in more than a dozen countries. Pieces have been covered in the New York and national art press including the interactive video-environment “The Cube,” the legendary Mir 2 Project, and the Voyage Platform. In 2004 Shelley lived and worked inside the walls of Pierogi Gallery for 5 weeks for an exhibition called “We Have Mice.” Shelley also formed a collaborative artist group to realize the Flatland project at SculptureCenter in 2007. Ward Shelley and collaborator Alex Schweder made and performed In Orbit, aka the artist hamster wheel, and ReActor, the spinning house in upstate New York.

Ward Shelley’s work is in a number of museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Art Museum, and The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Shelley received a painting and Sculpture award from the Joan Mitchell foundation, and has been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome since 2006. He has received NYFA and NEA fellowships in sculpture and new media categories, a Bessie Award for installation art, as well as private foundation grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.