Boaz Vaadia

Boaz Vaadia is an internationally recognized sculptor who has been working in New York City for over 30 years. Vaadia’s work is sited in many private and public collections and museums throughout the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Museum in Japan.

As a sculptor who grew up on a farm, Vaadia is inspired by the nature around him. Vaadia says of his work, “I work with nature as an equal partner. That’s still the strongest thing I deal with today, that primal connection of man to earth. It’s in the materials I use, the environments I make and the way I work.” His work appears as though created by natural

forces, such as wind and water; they look simultaneously ancient and futuristic, as if the workmanship forms a bridge from the Stone Age to the digital age. The figure’s rounded forms are anonymous and elemental creating universality and a model of humanity to which all viewers can relate.

The stone pieces are made of bluestone, which is used throughout the city for sidewalks and landscaping. Each stone is hand carved, chiseled, and chipped in the manner of ancient arrowheads. Vaadia then stacks these gradated bluestone pieces into a stratified human form that echoes how sediment is naturally layered in rock. The boulders used by Vaadia were brought to the New York Bay Area during the Ice Age and are part of the natural forces that formed Manhattan. Vaadia casts select stone pieces in bronze.