On a gray November day, Carol Bove, whose improbable works of steel upend all expectations of how the material should behave, is in the second floor office of her Brooklyn studio showing me a small-scale model of the Guggenheim Museum, where she will have a retrospective this spring.
“So that’s the High Gallery,” she says. Placed inside are tiny 3D-printed versions of seven new sculptures she’s making for the show. Even at a 1:12 scale, they have an air of both delicacy and heft—contradictions that have become a Bove signature. She pivots to look out a window at the shop floor below. “And those,” she says, breaking into a grin, “are the works.” A team of studio assistants pulls the plastic sheeting off two 14-foot-tall assemblages of raw and painted steel.
Bove has worked in this Red Hook studio for a decade, but she’s lived in the neighborhood since 2000—eight years after she first arrived in New York from California, where she grew up. The waterfront enclave is also where she’s raised her two children—a daughter, now 19 and attending McGill University, and a son, a sophomore in high school.
On the cavernous shop floor we scoot past forklifts and cranes to arrive at the base of one of the freshly unveiled sculptures, made from a slab of rusty steel rescued from a scrapyard in New Jersey and a crumpled rectangular steel tube painted blush pink. “The collaging of those elements really expresses the depth of the material,” Bove (pronounced bo-vay), 54, tells me. “They feel like they’re from completely different worlds.” Such a contrast can be unmooring—by design. Using not just steel but a wide array of materials, including driftwood, peacock feathers, and stone, Bove has long put perception at the heart of her artistic practice: What do we notice, and what do we overlook?
“There is a little bit of this je ne sais quoi to her sculptures, where you just can’t look away but also can’t quite explain them,” says Mary Mitsch, a director at Gagosian, the gallery that has represented Bove since 2023. (Mitsch worked with Bove at her previous gallery David Zwirner as well.) Recently Gagosian has staged solo shows of her work in Beverly Hills, New York, and Gstaad, Switzerland, and its presentation of her sculptures at the 2024 edition of Frieze London was hailed as a highlight of the fair. Though Bove’s art has appeared in some of the world’s most venerable institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Venice Biennale, and the niches of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim survey—which will include more than 100 works—will be the first to unite her earlier, and quite different, pieces with the steel sculptures for which she’s become known.
It will also make something of an argument for her centrality in sculptural history. “Traditionally steel sculpture was thought of as a very masculine endeavor,” says curator Katherine Brinson, who has been working with Bove on the retrospective for close to a decade. “You think about all those monumenal, externally sited sculptors—Richard Serra and so on. And I think Carol is putting a very feminist lens on that tradition.”
Bove does not shy away from the legacies of the Serras and John Chamberlains and Alexander Calders of the world. But her own experience and instincts have vaulted her to uncharted places: the first woman to chair the board of SculptureCenter, for example—a position she’s held since 2020.
If the macho world of sculpture is where Bove has established herself, it was not an easy realm for her to infiltrate. “I didn’t do sculpture in college because I didn’t really feel invited. It felt very boys club,” she says. Then there were physical considerations: Her early work used found objects and smaller materials she could manage on her own. When she introduced larger pieces that needed fabricating, she sent her designs to an outside company. When that company closed, she started hiring some of its employees to work with her directly. “It was just one step at a time,” she says. Today, she’s considered one of the most important American sculptors of her generation. Arlene Shechet, whose 2024 exhibition at Storm King added a welcome dose of color and volume to the Hudson Valley sculpture park, knows that taking on that art historical lineage is no easy feat. “Both Carol and I are playing with the big boys,” she says.
Bove is warm, quick to laugh, and a deep thinker about a great many things. She is an early riser. She loves lists. And she’s lived by the same black Filofax since 1992. “This is everything,” she says, brandishing the dog-eared planner like a family heirloom.
On the day we meet, Bove is wearing a denim work shirt and light-wash jeans. She has a streak of electric blue eyeliner across her lower lids, something she applies every day. “I would have to be so sick not to do it,” she tells me. With her short crop of blond hair and hazel-brown eyes, Michelle Williams or Carey Mulligan might play her in a film. She has two sweet cats, Torah and Anita, for whom she’s built a passageway from the shop floor to a storage room through the concrete ceiling, further evidence of her qualities as an “extraordinarily generous person,” as Brinson describes her.
Bove is not big on hobbies, she explains—at least not the kind that can be easily separated from her art. “Anything that I get really into ends up being part of my work.” Discovering audiobooks was a recent epiphany, though. “I kind of didn’t realize how dyslexic I am until now,” she says, and she listens on long drives upstate, where she also has a studio in the Catskills. Lately she’s been into Tolstoy. While doing administrative work, she’ll put on Alice Coltrane.
Bove was born in 1971 in Geneva, to American parents. When she was a toddler the family moved to California, eventually settling in Berkeley, where her mother’s family is from. “It was the ’70s, and everybody there was experimenting,” Bove says. There were two types of people in Berkeley then, she says: politics people and consciousness people. Not surprisingly, she grew up around the consciousness folks. Early encounters with outsider art in the mudflats of nearby Emeryville, along the San Francisco Bay shoreline, were formative. Art could be weird, and it could be by anybody.
She went to a co-op school whose pedagogy leaned toward the Human Potential Movement—think Esalen for kids. “It worked for me,” Bove says, though she could get frustrated in art classes. “They would just say, Do whatever you want. And as children, we claimed that we wanted more instruction.”
She had a harder time in high school. She had undiagnosed ADHD, and though she didn’t make any trouble at school, she was struggling. She dropped out after her junior year. She got her GED and enrolled at the California College of the Arts, but “I wasn’t really together enough to be in school.” She left, worked odd jobs around the Bay Area, and then moved to New York City in 1992. After a few years, she enrolled at NYU to finish her bachelor’s degree.
“I applied as a painter, and then when I got there, I felt too inhibited. It was too intimate for me to make things and have people watch me do it,” she says. She switched to photography, which wasn’t a great fit either—but developing film taught her about color. “ ‘What’s wrong with this print? Is it too green or too cyan?’ And the first time I heard that, I was like, What’s the difference between green and cyan?”
She finished her coursework in 1998 and began making art in an illegal loft near the Manhattan Bridge, but she had a feeling she was censoring herself. “I was too scared to look at what I actually cared about. There was an amount of shame that the thing that I really wanted to look at would be inherently not interesting.” She got to a point where she thought, Let’s just try. And that’s how she started the Playboy drawings.
Brinson identifies the Playboy drawings—soft, pastel-tinted renderings of models like Sharon Tate that look almost like Victorian cameos—as Bove’s first mature body of work, and they will be some of the earliest pieces on view at the Guggenheim. To make them, Bove looked at issues from the 1960s and early ’70s—she actually found a stack of the magazine in her parents’ closet, along with rejection letters to her mother, who had submitted her poetry for publication. Bove’s wish to revisit Playboy wasn’t just about the erotic; it explored the mix of sex and art, words and pictures. The drawings were a way of teasing out the contradictory world she was born into. Back then, Playboy published work by Ursula K. Le Guin, James Baldwin, and Alan Watts, and essays on progressive issues like access to birth control and opposing the Vietnam War. But what to make of the nude pictures? Was it empowering to pose for Playboy, or demeaning? The drawings poured out of her, and more work followed. “It was really continuous since then,” Bove says. “Everything is connected to that.”
Soon after, in the early aughts, Bove caught the broader attention of the art world
with her conceptual bookshelf installations. On repurposed Knoll tables and other midcentury-modern furniture, she’d situate those dreamy Playboy drawings and well-worn paperbacks from the ’60s and ’70s alongside found detritus like driftwood and shells. The meticulous tableaux struck a nerve. “Although the show looks casual, even accidental, it is anything but,” wrote New York Times critic Holland Cotter in 2003. “Every inclusion is meaningful, every placement minutely calculated.”
In 2012, Bove took what seemed like a hard left turn into outdoor sculpture. Up till then she had had a rule for herself, taken from the pages of conceptualism, that all the work had to use items that already existed. “At a certain point,” she says, “I wanted to make something that had different qualities, that was slick and not romantic.” The first appearance of a “glyph,” the name she gave her large, white powder-coated loop-de-loop steel works, was in a manicured garden at Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany; the next year, in 2013, two more were installed in an unfinished portion of the High Line in Manhattan, along with other sculptures she made from salvaged I-beams, concrete, and brass. “Carol’s project was absolutely my favorite. I’ve been on the High Line for over 14 years, but that project was really, really special and unique,” says Cecilia Alemani, the director and chief curator of High Line Art. The juxtaposition of the derelict, self-seeded land with these glossy white interventions was a puzzle you couldn’t quite solve. “As people walked through, they would find these objects almost as relics of a weird civilization,” Alemani says.
Back on the shop floor in Red Hook, Bove points out pieces of steel in various stages of development. Some are just out of the junkyard, others are awaiting sandblasting or their turn in the hermetically sealed paint room. It takes a large team (at the moment around 20 people, the biggest her studio gets) and a long time (a minimum of five months) to bring Bove’s large steel sculptures from “foggy notions in my mind” to the finish line. There’s a pile of newly built stackable benches, which she plans to install in the Guggenheim to offer museumgoers opportunities to rest.
She is intent on making the art-viewing experience not only physically but psychologically more comfortable, perhaps a remnant of her sense of herself as an outsider. From this desire came her idea to paint the interior spiraling wall of the museum’s ramp in a gradient, from inky gray at the bottom to white at the top. “There’s a really anxious moment that I notice, sort of like, How much more is there? And I’m hoping that this is actually going to make people feel more psychologically safe because you know where you are,” she says.
“Some of the most memorable exhibitions in the Guggenheim’s rotunda have been what I like to call the keys-to-the-castle mode, where we really allow an artist to take on Frank Lloyd Wright’s amazing architectural masterpiece and infuse that with their own creative language,” says Brinson. She cites Matthew Barney’s “The Cremaster Cycle” exhibition from 2003 and James Turrell’s light-filled fantasia in 2013, or even Hilma af Klint’s blockbuster 2018 show, as examples. Bove is the first artist to gradually lighten the rotunda’s wall color, but it is philosophically in line with the building’s ethos—an “optimistic ziggurat,” Wright called it.
Bove has long been interested in various spiritual practices, especially Zen Buddhism. The Buddhist concept of “no-self”—that there’s no permanent, unchanging version of a person—cropped up in our conversation several times, mainly as an explanation for the lack of separation between Carol Bove the person and Carol Bove the artist. To demonstrate, she walks me over to a piece she made in 2015 titled Legal Status of the Moon, with a peacock feather, a seashell, and found objects suspended delicately atop a platform. If you take out all the parts that are being displayed, she explains, “it’s just kind of junk. It all has to be put together to make it work.”
Before I leave the studio, I ask Bove about a beautiful little vase that’s been sitting on the table between us, holding a Japanese lily. She made it, of course, and others like it, out of stainless-steel scraps from the High Gallery sculptures. “Making and finding weird vases—I think that’s my chief hobby,” she says, finally identifying a pastime for me. They’ll be on display at the museum come March.