Tom Otterness

Tom Otterness (born 1952) is an American sculptor best known as one of America's most prolific public artists.

Otterness studied at the Art Students League of New York in 1970 and at the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973.

He was an active member of the artists' group Colab (Collaborative Projects) from its inception in 1977, and was involved in punk visual art, notably exhibiting in the Punk Art Exhibition in Washington DC, 1978.

Otterness began his career as a public art sculptor during his period with Colab and The Real Estate Show.

Shot Dog Film premiered at a Times Square screening room in early 1978, the film being shown in a loop, and viewers were flash-photographed when they left.

He sold small, plaster figures for $4.99 at Artists Space in New York for the 1979 holiday season.

His inspiration was the plaster replicas of Jesus and Elvis and Santería sculptures in botanica shops in the Bronx.

"I thought "Oh, this is public art… This is something that everyone can afford and take home." The next year he made a series of small plaster proto monuments for Colab's famous 1980 The Times Square Show, which he helped organize. This show featured inexpensive works by some 150 artists, including Kiki Smith, David Hammons and Jenny Holzer. He began showing with New York's Brooke Alexander Gallery soon after.

Many of Otterness's public works are found in New York City.

The Real World, located in Battery Park City, was commissioned in 1986 and installed in 1992.

The sculpture ensemble is meant to represent the world outside the playground, "a broad social allegory on art and life, where the games of power and control are played out in miniature … an imaginative park with things to touch and stories to invent."

In 1987, Otterness exhibited his work The Tables at the Museum of Modern Art Projects show.

White-collar workers, blue-collar workers, cops, radicals, captains of industry were displayed on four bronze picnic tables in the MoMA sculpture garden.

The show traveled to the IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez in Valencia, Spain; Portikus/Senckenbergmuseum in Frankfurt am Main; and Haags Gemeentemuseum in The Hague.

One of Otterness's earliest public art works, The New World, was installed in 1991 for the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles, California.

In 1994 he was elected as a member of the National Academy Museum.

His style is often described as cartoonish and cheerful, but also political.

His sculptures allude to sex, class, money and race.

These sculptures depict, among other things, huge pennies, pudgy characters in business suits with moneybag heads, helmeted workers holding giant tools, and an alligator crawling out from under a sewer cover.

His aesthetic can be seen as a riff on capitalist realism.

Known primarily as a public artist, Otterness has exhibited across the United States and internationally, including New York City, Indianapolis, Beverly Hills, The Hague, Munich, Paris, Valencia and Venice.

His studio is located in Gowanus, Brooklyn.

There is also a smaller installation, titled The Marriage of Money and Real Estate (1996), in the East River off the west shore of Roosevelt Island.

Otterness subsequently received Federal Courthouse commissions in Portland, Oregon (Law of Nature, 1997), Sacramento, California (Gold Rush, 1999) and Minneapolis, Minnesota (Rock Man, 1999).

His 1999 Feats of Strength is a collection of his iconic whimsical bronze figures representing faculty and students interacting with pieces of the natural sandstone at Western Washington University.

A familiar installation to New Yorkers is 2000's Life Underground, located in the 14th Street – Eighth Avenue NYC Subway station on the.

The sculptural group consists of over 100 cast-bronze sculptures placed throughout platforms and stairways, and is one of the most popular public artworks in the subway system.

It took over 10 years to complete, and includes figures of a woman toting a nearly life-size subway token under her arm; a well-dressed fare jumper crawling under a metal gate; a homeless woman being rousted by the police; and two figures holding a cross-cut saw to cut into an I-beam that holds up a stairway.

The New York Times noted, "Mr. Otterness worked hard to find creative ways to place his sculpture, navigating around the rules of stations design."

From September 20, 2004 to March 18, 2005, Tom Otterness on Broadway, his largest exhibition to date, featured 25 different works installed between Columbus Circle and 168th Street in Washington Heights, Manhattan.

The project was sponsored by the City of New York Parks and Recreation Department, the Broadway Mall Association, and Marlborough Gallery, and traveled to three other cities—Indianapolis, Beverly Hills, and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The Grand Rapids exhibition featured more than 40 works across two miles of the city's downtown area and at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park.

Otterness's later installations increasingly responded to and interacted with their physical and natural sites and environments.

In a more urban setting (Claremont, California), Otterness's 2007 Matriculated Nature is embedded in the tiers of a fountain.

Notably, it is one of his most intentionally thematic public artworks; Otterness's bronze figures are a series of vignettes to illustrate "the progression and evolution of knowledge and education, from early literacy to higher education," as they advance up the tiers of a fountain specially designed for the installation by architect Peter Tolkin.

Otterness's work with Colab in independent punk art comprised a number of short films; on Colab's All Color News, these included Rats in Chinatown, filming rats at a Chinese deli, and Golden Gloves boxing at Madison Square Garden (with John Ahearn), filming an amateur boxing match.

His independent punk films featured real-life aggression and violence, most notoriously Dog Shot Film/Shot Dog Film, where he adopted a dog from an animal shelter in Golden, Colorado, chained it to a stake, and filmed his hand shooting it dead.

This was followed by four fight films, where Otterness, an amateur boxer, filmed his own Golden Gloves fights.

Otterness's works adorn parks, plazas, subway stations, libraries, courthouses and museums around the world, notably in New York City's Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City and Life Underground in the 14th Street – Eighth Avenue New York Subway station.

He contributed a balloon (a giant upside-down Humpty Dumpty) to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.