A sculpture changes once it enters public life. It meets people on sidewalks, beside buildings, in traffic, and in the ordinary movement of a city—often before they have chosen to encounter it. For years, my work lived in galleries, museums, private collections, and exhibitions. I valued those spaces, but I wanted my sculptures to move beyond them: to enter the daily life of a city and be encountered unexpectedly by people of different ages, backgrounds, and histories. I am grateful that museums and public collections hold my sculptures. These institutions preserve them within an ongoing history, allowing future viewers to encounter, question, and reinterpret them. The studio begins the work; public life continues it.

That desire became real in 2007, when I presented my first two monumental works at InParadiso during the Venice Biennale. Seeing them among architecture, water, streets, movement, and people changed how I understood what sculpture could be. They were no longer objects placed in an exhibition. They had entered the world. Monumental sculpture creates a different kind of intimacy. A public work does not wait for a prepared viewer. It meets people where they are: on the way to work, from a passing car, beside a child, or again and again over many years. It becomes part of memory and place, belonging to a city without belonging to any one person. That shared life is what I value most about public art. A sculpture must live with weather, noise, traffic, architecture, and the unpredictable energy of human life. Its vulnerability echoes the vulnerability I have always explored in the body.

The Golden Mean, owned by the City of Peekskill, has become part of the city’s visual and emotional landscape. I think about the people who see it regularly, those who watched it arrive, and the meanings that gather through repeated encounters. A public sculpture accumulates stories. The Double Diver, owned by the City of Sunnyvale, California, and gifted by NetApp, carries a different energy. It speaks of movement, risk, balance, and the instant of entering the unknown. The divers are suspended between control and surrender—a tension I recognize as an artist: leaving solid ground and trusting the work to carry you. The works shown in St. Tropez, Paris, Park Avenue, and Chicago each developed a different public presence. Every location changes a sculpture. The same figure can feel intimate in one place, monumental in another, vulnerable somewhere else, or almost mythological in a different setting. A sculpture has no single fixed meaning; it absorbs the atmosphere of where it stands.