Ursula von Rydingsvard

Ursula von Rydingsvard was born Urszula Karoliszyn on July 26, 1942, in Deensen, in the Holzminden district of Germany. She was the fifth of seven children of Kunegunda (Sternal) Karoliszyn, a Pole, and Ignacy Karoliszyn, a Ukrainian who had adopted a Polish spelling of his surname after marrying, and the family spoke Polish at home. Her father had been conscripted for forced labor and placed on a farm in Deensen, where she spent her first years. After World War II the family lived for years in camps for displaced persons in Germany, housed in wooden barracks with rough wooden floors, walls and ceilings, an experience she repeatedly linked to her later sculpture.

In 1950 the family emigrated to the United States with the help of Catholic relief agencies and settled in Plainville, Connecticut. Her mother worked at a restaurant called Cook's Tavern, and her father managed the farm attached to it and also worked at the nearby Stanley Works factory. She helped run the household, looked after her siblings and later worked at the tavern herself. "I did everything dutifully," she told the Archives of American Art in 2011. "I did everything conscientiously. And I say that with regret." (Some sources, including the English Wikipedia article, give 1959 for the family's arrival; The New York Times obituary gives 1950.)

She studied for two years at the University of New Hampshire, then transferred to the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, where she earned a BA and an MA in 1964. Her own CV also lists study at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1970. After moving to New York in 1973 she enrolled at Columbia University and received an MFA in 1975. That year she also received a Fulbright-Hays travel grant. The Maryland Institute College of Art awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1991.

Von Rydingsvard began as a painter, mixing glue and sand into her paint until it grew so thick it fell off the canvas. At Columbia the only sculpture studio was a steel shop, and she found welding frustrating because she could not make steel look organic or soulful. Near the end of her time there, a fellow student, a monk named Michael Mulhern, bought her some four-by-four cedar beams. Within a short time cedar became her signature material.

Her method stayed remarkably consistent. She drew on the floor and on the beams in pencil, cut and gouged each beam with circular saws, stacked and glued hundreds of pieces into undulating forms, and often rubbed the surfaces with powdered graphite. She never made preparatory sketches for sculptures. "In order to make an organic form," she told Art21 in 2007, "you need to have many, many straight cuts." In the late 1970s she was part of New York's CETA-funded Cultural Council Foundation Artists' Project, and from 1981 she kept a studio in one Brooklyn neighborhood or another.

Major permanent commissions include works for Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, Storm King Art Center, the Bloomberg Building in New York, the Queens Family Courthouse, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Barclays Center, where her 19-foot, 12,000-pound sculpture Ona was installed in 2013. Key exhibitions included a ten-year retrospective at Storm King in 1992, Mad. Sq. Art at Madison Square Park in 2006, a survey of sculpture from 1991 to 2009 that opened at SculptureCenter in Queens in 2011 and travelled, her first British show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2014, a 2015 presentation at the Giardino della Marinaressa during the Venice Biennale, The Contour of Feeling at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in 2018 and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in 2019, and Nothing But Art in Krakow, Oronsko and Warsaw in 2021. In 2026 she showed new cedar works and drawings at Galerie Lelong in New York while the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, presented a twenty-year survey. She taught at Yale, the School of Visual Arts, Fordham University and the Pratt Institute.

Her first marriage was to Milton von Rydingsvard, whose surname she kept professionally. They had a daughter, Ursula Anne von Rydingsvard, who became a filmmaker and had three children. She left that marriage in 1973 and moved to Manhattan with her daughter. In 1985 she married the neuroscientist Paul Greengard of Rockefeller University, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Greengard died in 2019 and her daughter died in 2022. She lived in Manhattan and worked in Brooklyn. Her surviving relatives include her siblings Christine Brooks and Stash Karoliszyn and three grandchildren.

Von Rydingsvard described art making as a necessity rather than a career. In a 2018 catalogue she listed her reasons for making art, which ranged from staying awake and alive to finding a place to put family pain and sadness. She resisted the cool austerity of Minimalism, preferring forms that carried the trace of the human hand, and she wanted public sculpture to be touched. Speaking about Ona in 2013, she said, "You don't have to pay a fee or enter a museum, and no guard will tell you not to touch it," adding that she would love people to touch it. She remained candid about self-doubt late in life, telling Art21 that her biggest hope was to gain more courage and trust in herself.

Von Rydingsvard was one of very few women working in monumental sculpture, and her cedar works became instantly recognizable. Critics compared her to Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, and the critic Michael Brenson wrote in 1988 that her sculptural process had a great deal to do with release. Her work is held by more than thirty museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Walker Art Center, Crystal Bridges, the High Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery. Public works such as Ona at Barclays Center keep her sculpture in daily view of thousands of passers-by.

Her honours include National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist grants (1978, 1979 and 1986), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1983), an Athena Foundation grant (1983), an honorary doctorate from the Maryland Institute College of Art (1991), International Association of Art Critics (AICA-USA) exhibition prizes (1992, 2000 and 2011), the Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1994), the Joan Mitchell Award (1997), a residency at the American Academy in Rome (2007), the Rappaport Prize from the deCordova Museum (2008), election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008), the Order of the Cross from the Polish Consulate in New York (2008), the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture (2011), the International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award (2014), a Visionary Woman award from Moore College of Art and Design (2017), the College Art Association Artist Award for Distinguished Body of Work (2019) and Poland's Gold Medal for Merit to Culture Gloria Artis (2021).

She appeared in the Ecology episode of Season 4 of the PBS series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century (2007) and in several Art21 Extended Play films. Monographs include The Sculpture of Ursula von Rydingsvard (Hudson Hills Press, 1996) and Ursula von Rydingsvard: Working by Patricia Phillips (Prestel, 2011), plus a 2014 Yorkshire Sculpture Park catalogue with text by Molly Donovan of the National Gallery of Art. Daniel Traub's feature documentary Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own (2019) followed her life and work, and the Archives of American Art recorded a two-day oral history with her in 2011. Annie Liontas's story Bent Lace in BOMB Magazine (2024) also draws on her work.

No significant public controversies have been documented.

Ursula von Rydingsvard died at her home in Manhattan on Tuesday, October 27, 2026, at the age of 84. Courtney Childress, her studio manager, confirmed the death to The New York Times and said the cause was Alzheimer's disease. Funeral and burial arrangements have not been made public.