Vivien Collens

Biography

Vivien Collens was born in Cleveland, Ohio, earned a BFA at Carnegie Mellon in 1968 and an MFA at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in 1971. She began her career in Cleveland in the 1970s with wall-mounted geometric structures, receiving recognition in the Cleveland Museum of Art's May Show, and moved to New York in 1977. Fellowships at Yaddo and MacDowell followed; a book read at Yaddo in 1979 sparked the energized series The Romance of Electricity and Networks. In the 1980s she exhibited with Luise Ross and Marilyn Pearl galleries and at the Aldrich Museum.

In 1985 she moved to the Hudson Valley, raising a family while her painted forms pushed further off the wall. Small painted wood City Blocks, made for a 2015 Urban Studies show at Gensler's Rockefeller Center gallery, convinced her to commit to sculpture. In 2017, at Salem Art Works, she learned to weld, and she now fabricates large welded, riveted and bent metal works in her Cornwall studio.

Her outdoor sculpture has been installed in New Orleans and Kenner, Louisiana, Bennington, Salem, Beacon and the Newburgh Sculpture Project, and in Collens in Cornwall, a year-long public exhibition (2024-25). She founded the Storm King Decision project, a 2025 Orange County Arts Council featured commission. Holland Tunnel Newburgh showed her New Sculpture in 2019 and 2023, and she returned for Reclamation in 2025. Her work is in collections including the Cleveland Museum of Art and Currier Museum of Art.

Practice. Geometric abstraction that moved from shaped paintings and wall installations to welded, riveted and bent metal sculpture scaled for outdoor public sites, recently extending into environmental art and wearable sculpture.