At 79 years old, sculptor Judy Pfaff continues to push artistic boundaries with the same experimental spirit that has defined her five-decade career. The MacArthur Fellow and Lifetime Achievement Award winner is currently showcasing her latest innovation with neon lighting in her exhibition "Light Years" at Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York's Tribeca neighborhood, running through December 20th.

Pfaff's journey into sculpture began unexpectedly after earning her Master of Fine Arts in painting from Yale University in 1973. "Painters didn't interest me—the way they talked about things," she explained during a recent interview in Tribeca, her former neighborhood. Bored with traditional painting approaches, she decided to teach herself sculpture through unconventional means. "I kept buying these funny little books," she recalled, "like '100 Experiments for the Scientist'—books for children about how to do things." This DIY approach reminded her of Mr. Wizard, the television scientist who transformed household experiments into sources of wonder.

When Pfaff relocated to a loft on Canal Street in the mid-1970s, she brought her experimental mindset with her. She frequently visited neighborhood hardware stores, collecting wire, plastics, and various materials that caught her attention, treating each material as "a hypothesis about what sculpture could be." This method of exploration through materials became her signature approach, evident today in her Hudson Valley studio, which overflows with eclectic materials, vibrant colors, and industrial scraps that she transforms into maximalist sculptures and installations.

After completing her Yale degree, Pfaff drove from New Haven to New York City with her dog, quickly securing a 3,000-square-foot space on Canal Street for just $150 per month. Her graduate school experience had been disappointing—she expected brilliant conversations with talented artists and faculty engagement, but found it "one of the more boring experiences." New York City became the education she had hoped graduate school would provide, offering her the freedom to develop her own artistic methods.

During her early years in the city, Pfaff was drawn to the expressive work of performance artists including Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Laurie Anderson. She also formed a lasting friendship with abstract painter Al Held, her former Yale instructor. "He and I were very close—until the day he died, actually," she said. "We sparred all the time about art and things." Held provided Pfaff with her first major opportunity, selecting her for a show at Artists Space just one year after her arrival in New York. This led to her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial in 1975.

Held also introduced Pfaff to renowned dealer Holly Solomon, who began representing her work in 1979. "Holly was a little bit like working for Madonna," Pfaff said with laughter. "She was über-glamorous. Fun was everything." Through Solomon, Pfaff connected with what she called "graffiti kids and mischief makers," including comic book artist Christopher Knowles and downtown experimentalist Gordon Matta-Clark. This rebellious artistic community encouraged Pfaff to expand her concepts of art-making.

By the early 1980s, Pfaff was creating vast, immersive environments filled with bright colors and frantically arranged materials. In 1980, Holly Solomon presented Pfaff's "Deep Water," an installation that filled the entire gallery with tangled strands of wicker, tree branches, rattan, and wire mesh—resembling a Wassily Kandinsky composition extending into three-dimensional space. "I was doing stuff that was unbelievably not sellable," Pfaff admitted. "And I remember Holly once saying, 'If I can sell this shit, I will be a great dealer.'"

Pfaff's innovation never ceased as she expanded her practice across wall-based constructions and immersive, site-specific installations combining industrial and organic materials. During her career's early phase, she mounted installations throughout the United States, from California State University to Gladstone Gallery in New York. Her work appeared again at the Whitney in 1981, and the scale and bold materiality of her creations earned critical acclaim and numerous accolades, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983.

While working in Brooklyn, Pfaff discovered beauty in urban decay, incorporating burned-out furniture, twisted metal, and storm-damaged debris as raw materials. On one occasion, a 40-foot sign torn loose by wind became part of her artwork. Despite using industrial components, her works never abandoned color. "When artists work in black and white, it's like you cut off 50 percent of what was open for you to do," she observed.

The chaotic nature of her work often reflected her creative process, but Pfaff found that solutions frequently appeared unexpectedly. "Sometimes I'd be in tears, wondering how to fix it," she said. "Then I'd walk out on the sidewalk, and the answer would be tumbling around." A notable example of this serendipitous timing occurred in 1994 after completing "Cirque, Cirque" (1995), a massive commission for the Pennsylvania Convention Center. She suddenly remembered an upcoming show at Brandeis University scheduled in just ten days. Driving north through a snowstorm with welding equipment and fiberglass, she arrived at an empty, ice-covered campus. As if on cue, a tree collapsed into a nearby creek, exposing its roots perfectly. "That was it," she recalled. "We started with that." The resulting piece, "elephant" (1995), was improvised into existence.

Five decades into her career, Pfaff remains as restless and inventive as ever. A few years ago, while working on chandelier pieces, she turned to neon—a material she had previously avoided due to its cost and fragility. After a friend introduced her to neon artist Joe Upham, she became fascinated with the medium. She eventually invited Upham to establish a workspace in her studio, where he began producing the glowing forms that became integral to her installations. Pfaff views neon as a counterbalance to her loose, intuitive methods. "Neon artists are very tight," she said with a laugh. "I'm not that."

At Cristin Tierney Gallery, Pfaff's neon experiments culminate in new wall works, particularly "Travels to Bisnegar" (2025), which feels alive—like a rippling flying carpet weaving through multicolored neon spokes. The exhibition also features ten new wall panels and several new wall-mounted sculptures incorporating neon. "Travels to Bisnegar" showcases a recycled plastic carpet cascading across the wall, adorned with artificial flowers and pierced by fluorescent neon rods, representing a bold, luminous direction for the artist.

The show includes Pfaff's new colorful vertical panels, "finite sequence of mathematically rigorous instructions" (2025), composed of acrylic and poured resin, some decorated with recycled umbrellas and foam. This continues work from "A Walk in the Park," Pfaff's 2024 solo exhibition at Atlanta's Johnson Lowe Gallery, but now integrates neon rods that slice through the panel surfaces. While her work has often been described as happy or upbeat, Pfaff characterizes these new panels as more sober—earthier in palette and less exuberant in tone. However, this sobriety still emerges in energetic form, with each wall work streaked with light and texture, evoking both stained glass and Abstract Expressionist canvases.

Pfaff's recognition includes becoming a MacArthur Fellow in 2004, joining the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2009, and receiving the International Sculpture Center's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. Her current exhibition at Cristin Tierney marks her first show with the gallery after they began representing her earlier this year, and represents the gallery's inaugural exhibition in their new Tribeca location. This new body of work reaffirms Pfaff's relentless drive to test the limits of color, light, and matter, demonstrating that even after five decades, she continues to break artistic rules and forge new creative territories.