Artist Lecture – Radical Softness: The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman
Radical Softness: The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman
Join us for an artist lecture with Janet Echelman, an artist featured in the exhibition Avant Garde: Remarkable Women in the Permanent Collection. Janet Echelman creates experiential sculpture at the scale of buildings that transform with wind and light. The art shifts from being an object you look at, to something you can get lost in. Her work defies categorization as it intersects disciplinary boundaries, from Sculpture, Architecture, and Urban Design to Material Science, Computer Science, Engineering, and Performance. Using unlikely materials from knotted fiber and atomized water particles to choreographed dancers, Echelman combines ancient craft with original computational design software to create artworks that have become focal points for urban life on five continents.
Lectures are offered free with the cost of daily admission:
- Art+ Museum Members: Free
- Not-Yet-Members: $25
- College Students: Free
Janet Echelman creates experiential sculpture at the scale of buildings that transform with wind and light. Oprah ranked Echelman’s work #1 on her List of 50 Things That Make You Say Wow!, and she recently received the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts, honoring “the greatest innovators in America today.” Recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellowship, Harvard Loeb Fellowship, and Fulbright Lectureship, Echelman was named an Architectural Digest Innovator for “changing the very essence of urban spaces.” Her TED talk “Taking Imagination Seriously” has been translated into 35 languages with more than two million views.
In 2025, Chronicle Books published Radical Softness: The Responsive Art of Janet Echelman, a 288-page visual compendium of Echelman’s oeuvre which accompanies a traveling mid-career museum retrospective. Her permanent commissions have transformed urban environments worldwide, and include Remembering the Future at the MIT Museum (2025), Butterfly Rest Stop in Frisco, TX (2024), Current in Columbus, OH (2023), Bending Arc at the St. Pete Pier in Florida (2020), Earthtime Korea in South Korea (2020), mist sculpture Pulse (2018) in front of Philadelphia City Hall, Dream Catcher (2017) on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, CA, Impatient Optimist (2015) at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Every Beating Second (2011) at San Francisco International Airport, Her Secret Is Patience (2009) in downtown Phoenix, and She Changes (2005) in Porto, Portugal.
For more information visit www.echelman.com
Image Caption: Photograph by Amy Martz