Tom Otterness

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 on Ludlow Street in New York City.

Tom Otterness studied at Art Students League of New York, Wichita Southeast High School and Whitney Independent Study Program. The field of work recorded is art of sculpture. Places of work recorded in the authority are New York City. Works named in the authority record are Life Underground. Work by Tom Otterness is recorded in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Ulrich Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MTA Arts & Design Permanent Art Collection and Whitney Museum of American Art.

• Name — Tom Otterness • Born — 1952 • Birthplace — Wichita, Kansas • Field — Sculpture, Prints and Drawing • Movement — Colab

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.

• Illustration — A sculpture in the Beelden aan Zee Museum, The Hague • Illustration — Another view of the same sculpture • Illustration — Creation Myth at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY • Illustration — Herring Eater, The Netherlands Otterness began his career as a public art sculptor during his period with Colab and The Real Estate Show. 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." A familiar installation to New Yorkers is 2000's Life Underground, located in the 14th Street–Eighth Avenue station of the New York City Subway, served by the 14th Eighth. 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." 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. 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. Otterness subsequently received Federal Courthouse commissions in Portland, Oregon (Law of Nature, 1997), Sacramento, California (Gold Rush, 1999) and Minneapolis, Minnesota (Rock Man, 1999).

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. 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. 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. His 2004 Fairy-Tale Sculptures, installed at the Beelden aan Zee museum along the beachfront in The Hague, reference various fairytales such as Hansel and Gretel and Jonah and the whale and mix playful shapes with scenes of peril. The museum notes that children are encouraged to touch, climb, and interact with the sculptures. In a more urban setting (Claremont, California), Otterness's 2007 Matriculated Nature is embedded in the tiers of a public plaza 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 has practiced tai chi, martial arts, and boxing since the mid-1960s. His studio has been photographed featuring a boxing bag. Some early boxing fights in the 1970s were filmed as part of his no wave punk art period, and he has won prizes for his tai chi in the school of William C. C. Chen. He lives with the American filmmaker Coleen Fitzgibbon on the Lower East Side in New York City and in Utica, Montana.