No Vacancy
Sculptors Guild

No Vacancy is a group exhibition of forty-two sculptors of the Guild who endeavored to create engaging, provocative, and evocative, works that give expression to a multiplicity of lived experiences and braided identities, working in multiple media, using methods ranging from traditional to experimental. No Vacancy implies that a space is already taken, that is has found a purpose. That assertive statement animates this summer’s sculpture exhibition. No Vacancy declares that sculpture is the inherent and compelling occupant of space, and as such it embodies the foundation for the city’s rebirth. The Sculptors Guild held its first public exhibition in 1938 at a vacant lot on 38th and Park Ave. A glance back at that period evokes the struggles of the Great Depression and the growing threat of Fascism, yet more than forty thousand visitors saw that pop-up show. Eighty-four years later the current zeitgeist suggests another inflection point, a halting emergence from a pandemic, an epic global environmental crisis, and a fraught political landscape. Now, and then, artists of the Sculptors Guild responded by creating works that address the totality of human experience – hope and fear, longing and loss, desire and defeat, what’s observed and what’s imagined.