Syd Carpenter’s collaborative relationship with clay began on the potter’s wheel. But her mixed-media sculptures are inspired by her generational relationship with the land she nurtures. “Clay, as a material, is extremely animated in that it responds, and that response is so provocative for me,” says the Philadelphia-based artist. Similarly, “I’m influenced by what I observe in the garden I’ve tended for almost 30 years, which connects me to the history of African Americans [including her mother and grandmother] as stewards of their own land.” She is “drawn to the texture of soil, the undulation of the earth’s surface,” just as she reacts “to the transitory and ephemeral in materials like clay, steel, glass, and fabric, none of which are transitory or ephemeral.”

Carpenter was a painter before discovering clay, finding “the processes used to make an object engaging,” along with the capacity to hone her techniques through “tried and true shapes.” She graduated with a BA and MFA from Tyler School of Art in the 1970s, after which Carpenter and her husband, Steve Donegan, founded the 915 Spring Garden Studio Building, a facility for more than 100 artists, where she began “subverting the imperative of stability in clay,” she explains. “I try to incorporate irregularity in my sculptures, avoiding flattened bottoms and bases where possible. It’s a challenge that often leads to surprising results.”

Her series Places of Our Own, for instance, was inspired by maps of southern African American farms and gardens created by landscape architect Richard Westmacott. Carpenter’s dynamic sculptural evocations reference such everyday objects as clothespins and bottles, tangled into rebus-like configurations with representations of trees, fence posts, and railroad tracks. In these object landscapes, food, labor, wealth, and poverty are equally present.

Her teaching at Swarthmore College, where she’s now professor emerita, exposed Carpenter “to an intellectual environment, and a diverse and rigorous range of disciplines, including the arts.” She’s humbled by “the visionary expressiveness in the architecture, spirituality, and wonder captured by the handmade” discovered during travels around the globe, which she has absorbed into her own work.

Carpenter’s widely exhibited work is in the collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Swedish National museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Tang Teaching Museum of Skidmore College, the RISD Museum of Art, Fuller Craft Museum, the James A. Michener Art Museum, and the Woodmere Art Museum. She’s received awards from United States Artists, Anonymous Was a Woman, the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

syd-carpenter.swarthmore.edu | @sydcrpntr

Read more about the other 2024 ACC Awards recipients and honorees here.