Kiah Celeste’s Sculptures Begin Where Other People’s Objects End
Kiah Celeste did not arrive at sculpture through a conventional studio path. The New York artist majored in photography at SUNY Purchase, then left the medium behind after school, frustrated by its rules and technical discipline. Her sculptural practice, she says, began later, while working as an art handler in New York and at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, where she learned to look at materials less as fixed things than as potential forms.
That shift is visible in works such as Balance Bath (2019), which grew out of a marble tub she found in Abu Dhabi while helping organize a pop-up exhibition with limited resources. Celeste turned the object into an inclined pink sculpture marked by Memphis Group-like shapes and squiggles, a work that feels at once playful and carefully engineered.
Celeste, a New York native, has continued to forage for used materials ever since. She avoids anything new, both for environmental reasons and because, as she puts it, used objects are more affordable and carry history. In her hands, old CDs become Ouroboros (2025), while the Dream of Pearl series (2023) transforms acrylic skylight domes and bowling balls into forms that read like pearls resting on pillows. The effect is disorienting in a deliberate way: the familiar becomes strange, then strangely elegant.
Her work is built on tension. Celeste often describes her sculptures through active verbs — stretched, pierced, bent, suspended — and the forms seem to hover between Minimalism’s restraint and the directness of readymade objects and Pop. Pending Mobile (2024), with its round ball forced through a gridded cube, makes that pressure literal.
The artist also sees the work as a reflection of her own divided sense of self. She describes her inner world as tumultuous and points to split belonging across Black and Jewish, feminine and androgynous identities. Recent two-person exhibitions with Gordon Hall at Document Gallery in Chicago in 2025, Eric Oglander at Swivel Gallery in New York in 2023, and Vivian Springford at Swivel suggest how central dialogue and contrast are to her practice. Celeste’s sculptures do not smooth over contradiction. They hold it in suspension.
