Sculptor Offner to Start Sunday Series

Elliot Offner, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and printer to the college, will be the first speaker in this year’s Sundays at 2 lecture series, sponsored by Smith College and the Friends of Forbes Library. His talk, “Recent Work and New Projects,” will be Sunday, October 6, at 2 p.m. at Forbes Library. An exhibition, “Elliot Offner: Sculptures, Woodcuts and Photographs” is currently on display in the library’s second floor gallery.

Offner’s sculptures have been featured in many solo exhibitions and are included in such public collections as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Brooklyn Museum, the Milwaukee Museum of art and the Detroit Institute of Art. His awards and honors include the National Sculpture Society’s Gold Medal, and most recently, the Harry Watrous Medal and Prize, also from the National Sculpture Society and the Ellin T. Speyer Prize of the National Academy of Design. This year he was elected a Life Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University. Clare Hall is an international graduate institute for advanced study.

Offner’s commissions and public sculptures include Holocaust Memorial Figure at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City, and Loon, Great Blue Heron and Grouse, monumental fountain sculpture, at the Nicolet Mall in Minneapolis. His Great Blue Heron and Johnson Memorial Horse are familiar sights on the Smith campus. Currently, Offner is director of a large project that is commissioning leading American sculptors to create ten over-life-size sculptures of historically important American women. Offner will create one of the sculptures; the first casts of the collection will be placed on the campus of Converse College in South Carolina.

Offner, who was educated at the Cooper Union and Yale University, is currently president of the National Sculpture Society.