Alice Aycock
Alice Aycock is an internationally renowned artist, celebrated for her large-scale sculptures and public installations that synthesize themes of complex technology and natural forces. Aycock was an early participant in the Land Art movement in the early 1970s and throughout her career spanning more than five decades, she has explored cybernetics, phenomenology, physics, post-structuralism, information-overload, scientific discoveries, and computer programming to create works that sit on the cross-section between architecture and sculpture.
Alice Aycock was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1946 and has lived in New York City since 1968. She graduated from Douglass College in New Brunswick, NJ before receiving her Masters at Hunter College in New York in 1971. She has received numerous honors, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Sculpture (2025), the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts Achievement Award in Visual Arts (2019), the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award (2018), the International Association of Art Critics Award (2014), the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2013), and the Americans for the Arts Public Art Award (2008).
Her work has been presented in exhibitions around the world, including solo shows at Olin Hall Galleries, MoMA, MCA Chicago, Serpentine Gallery, Royal Djurgården, Stockholm, as well as comprehensive European museum retrospectives in Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Alice Aycock’s works can be found in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, LACMA, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and many others. Numerous early and recent outdoor installations are permanently located in public and private collections in the US, Europe and Asia.
Since 2010, she has been represented by Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin, and has had multiple solo exhibitions with the gallery. Aycock is currently constructing a building as part of Art Omi Pavilions, a new 190-acre art center in Chatham, NY, led by Francis Greenburger. The Alice Aycock Pavilion will debut in 2027, with a new permanent artwork as well as historical installations.
The Solar Wind
The Solar Wind, installed on the Roanoke College campus in 1983, is a metaphorical machine for collecting and harnessing the energy of the solar wind that evokes the technology and philosophy of both the Industrial Revolution and the future. Aycock sees her mechanisms as analogues for abstract thought and human social systems because she defines a machine simply as a device that acts upon a substance to achieve a change of position or condition.
Alice Aycock, Solar Wind Model, 1980, wood, metal, plastic, 13 3/8" x 14"x 12", Roanoke College Permanent Collection, Gift of the Artist
Alice Aycock, The Rotary Lightning Express (An Apparatus for Determining the Effects of Mesmerism on Terrestrial Currents , 1980, lithograph print, 45 3/4" x 34", Roanoke College Permanent Collection, Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo