Syd Carpenter

Syd Carpenter is a sculptor living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She studied painting and ceramics at the Tyler School of art receiving her MFA degree in 1976. Her work, focusing on African American farms and gardens, is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, Fuller Craft Museum, the Tang Museum of Skidmore College, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, The Swedish National Museum, the James A Michener Museum, Woodmere Museum and the Montreal Museum of Art. She is Professor Emeritas of Studio Art at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.

She has been a resident artist at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Penland School of Crafts, Anderson Ranch, the Vermont Studio School and the Watershed Center. Travels to China, Ghana, Brazil, West Africa, Indonesia and Central America have all influenced her work. She has been a professor of studio art at Swarthmore College since 1991. She currently holds the Endowed Peggy Chan Professorship of Black Studies at Swarthmore. Her awards and felllowships include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, Leeway Foundation Grants, National Endowment for the Arts, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships. Current projects include “The Crest a permanent outdoor garden installation that combines horticulture and sculpture. A new garden/sculpture installation is planned for the Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia. And the Berman Museum of Ursinus College has commissioned a garden/sculpture for its campus. Her upcoming retrospective will be exhibited in the galleries of the Berman Museum.

Visit Syd Carpenter’s website and Instagram page.