We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Carole` Feuerman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Carole` thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I knew I wanted to be an artist at three years old when I used shoe polish as my paint and my mother’s white linoleum kitchen floor as my canvas. I graduated from the School of Visual Arts and began my career as an illustrator before pursuing sculpture. I am passionate about the medium of hyper-real sculpture for its ability to resonate with people on a personal level.

I want my art to engage and inspire the viewer to look closely at what stands before them. It is not the fleeting moment that I want to capture, but the universal feeling caught in that fleeting moment.

Since I was young, painting with colors brought peace to my soul, even when I was five years old. When I was in the fifth grade, I started drawing outlines of the human body, and the more I did it, the better I got at it. Practice makes one perfect, and I soon perfected drawing the body with one continuous line. The drawing was something I did everywhere, on any chance. I remember drawing a woman’s body using my new line technique, which I showed to the boy sitting next to me in the back of the classroom. The teacher sensed that I was showing him something and so-called me forward to see what it was. When she found what I had drawn – a nude image, she got furious and sent me to the principal’s office right away. Visiting the principal’s office wasn’t that bad. As a punishment, I just had to teach the other kids to draw. Of course, minus the nude part.

I am widely known for my hyperrealist sculptures of swimmers with water drops.

Physicality is a huge part of my work. The hyper-realistic style of my art is what creates the physicality for which my sculptures are known. The realism in my art stems from my desire to portray real emotions and physical states of being—from peaceful serenity to energy, equilibrium and vigour.

I make my sculptures about people who are comfortable in their own skin. I promote the idea of total health. The World Health Organization stated in 1970, the decade in which I began making my sculptures, that health embraced a total package of ‘physical, mental, and social wellbeing, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. A sound mind in a sound body, in other words. This is one of the defining aspects of my realistic style. Forty years ago, showing healthy, intelligent women was a radical departure in contemporary art. Now it is a widely accepted ideal, yet most contemporary artists don’t explore this topic—at least not in figurative art. My realistic style allows me to present a universal moment to which every viewer can relate. I explore emotional dimensions where the sculpture depicts, not just one frozen second, but an infinite and universally state of being. Underlying the realistic daily activities depicted in my sculptures are common threads of experience that connect us to one another.

Carole`, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Carole A. Feuerman (born 1945) is an American sculptor and author working in Hyperrealism. She is one of the three artists credited with starting the movement in the late 1970s. She is best known for her figurative works of swimmers and dancers. She is the only artist to make realistically painted outdoor sculptures and the only woman to sculpt in this style. Feuerman’s public works have been exhibited in: Central Park and SoHo, the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, l’ Avenue George V and Saint Tropez, Hung Tai Museum in Changzhou, Harbor City, CHN, the Arsenale in the Venice Biennale, Giardino della Marinaressa, Palazzo Strozzi Palace, and Palazzo Reale, New Bond Street and Canary Wharf, and Osthaus Museum, Museumsplatz 1, Hagen, DEU.
Exhibitions include Corpus Domini at Palazzo Reale, Milan, Master of Hyperrealism at the Church of The Pietà and Paradiso Art Gallery in Venice, ITA, Carole A. Feuerman: From la Biennale di Venezia and Open to Rome at Galleria d’Arte Moderna and Terrazzo del Pincio in Rome, Reflections of the Soul in Saint-Tropez, Hyperrealisme, Ceci n’est pas un corps at the Musée Maillol and Monumental on Avenue George V in Paris, and The Importance of Being Human at the Medici Museum of Art in Ohio, USA. Feuerman has a monumental public exhibition on Park Avenue, and a solo exhibition at Fondazione Made in Cloister in May.
Feuerman has received multiple awards including the Lifetime Achievement ‘Goddess Artemis” Award from the European American Woman’s Council (EAWC). She has also received the Special Honor Award in Changzhou CHN, Best in Show in Beijing CHN, the Amelia Peabody Award, First Prize at the Olympic Fine Art Exhibition in Beijing, and the Medici Award in Florence ITA. She has taught, lectured, and given workshops at the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum.
In 2011, she founded Carole A. Feuerman Sculpture Foundation. She has four full color monographs and three autobiographies in English and Italian. Her works are in the permanent collections of thirty-one museums and owned by the cities of Sunnyvale California and Peekskill NY, the State Hermitage, El Paso Museum, Steven A. Cohen, Former President Clinton, The Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, the Caldic Collection, Maluma, Dr. Henry Kissinger, and Malcolm Forbes.

Throughout my artistic career, my style has undergone many transformations, but my passion for art and my love of creating art endure.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I’ve had to transition to other art forms several times as an artist. In the very beginning, I started with illustrations, for which I had garnered quite the praise. Soon enough, however, I found the medium of sculpture calling out to me, like some distant, mysterious call that went straight into my heart. Alas, I could not repress the temptation anymore. Before I knew it, I started working on my first sculpture and almost instantaneously found myself engulfed in the world of hyperrealist sculpture.

Another catastrophic moment struck in my career when the judge, against my hopes, ordered a judgment on me for $750,000.00. I had just lost my studio in NY, and I was renting a studio in a building in Jersey City. When the developer evicted all occupants in the building and having spent a lot of money to move and make my new studio, I refused to leave. He then switched off the elevator, the water, and the electric supplies and forced me out. I had a museum show scheduled, and I had to lower my art on ropes out the windows, no small feat since my studio was on the 16th floor. I stopped paying rent for several months while this happened, and he took me to court. I thought I would win, but unfortunately, this didn’t turn out to be the case. Judges serve for life, a sad fact that we should try to change.

Another troubling thing for me to deal with was that the art world often overlooked me.
When figurative realism was featured prominently in a show a few years ago at the Met Breuer, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body,” I was not invited to participate. I respect and value the hundred and twenty art objects included in the show, and in principle, I didn’t mind that my work didn’t appear. The thing is, The Met and MoMA and institutions like them are big players in deciding which practitioners become the canon of a movement.

The first sculptures I created in the late 1970s were my erotic series. Before long, these early works started to grab people’s attention in the art and media industry. The first of my many difficult experiences happened in Fort Worth, Texas, where the insistence of a Texas-based art dealer, I exhibited my erotic art at her gallery. No one, save security guards and a handful of people, attended the opening. I had faith in my talent, but this experience shattered it. I was distraught. I was not used to failure. I had made good money from my commercial art, but because I genuinely believed in my talent, I had given it up to focus on my fine art. When I came back to New York, I decided never to go back to illustration. Since erotic works were inciting people who even gave me threats, I opted to make my next body of work about the least erotic subject possible, i.e., leisure sports, which led me to make my first swimmer.

When people a century from now look back at the art world of this era, they will look to the shows at big museums as objective descriptions of today’s art, not the particularity of galleries or the overwhelming quantity of work at international art fairs. When I visited
that show, it got me thinking about what differentiates my work from those of my contemporaries from the 1970s and 1980s and what could be obscured from history if the work of artmakers like myself is left out.

On a positive note, there were plenty of other positive moments in my art career, too, like when New York City Parks and Recreation selected my sculpture, ‘Survival of Serena,’ to go on public view in Soho. The public loved the sculpture, and many people waited in line to see it up close. I’ve always said that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Now that it was a monumental scale, the reactions to the sculpture were overwhelming and instilled hope in me that I could make it big in the art world.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

On a positive note, there were plenty of other positive moments in my art career, too, like when New York City Parks and Recreation selected my sculpture, ‘Survival of Serena,’ to go on public view in Soho. The public loved the sculpture, and many people waited in line to see it up close. I’ve always said that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Now that it was a monumental scale, the reactions to the sculpture were overwhelming and instilled hope in me that I could make it big in the art world. In 2020, and now, in 2023, I’m finally recognized. I had a show of my Monumental sculptures on Avenue George V in Paris. Currently I have a solo show of nine monumental works on the Park Avenue Divide in New York as well as a solo show at the Foundation Made in Cloister.

I love to show my works publically. One of my sculptures was bought by Net App and donated to the City of Sunnyvale California and another monumental piece was bought by the city of Peekskill New York.

The best part of being an artist is my wonderful journey and the process of creating that I have been blessed with.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.carolefeuerman.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/carolefeuerman
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/caroleafeuerman
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carole-a-feuerman-6781119
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/carolefeuerman
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCEPFD4qecuxZb7zdJiiGWg
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=carolefeuerman&t=1640893692915 https://www.pinterest.com/carole0576/

Image Credits
Ken Sax Richie Nuzzolese Carole A. Feuerman David Ashton Brown