Cliff Garten
Cliff Garten is creative director and founder of Cliff Garten Studio in Venice, California. The studio’s landscape sculptures form urban spaces, plazas, infrastructure, and memorials throughout the U.S. and internationally. Focusing on sculpture that integrates into engineering, architecture and landscape, Garten has been an important voice in advocating for what he calls landscape sculpture and “the expressive potential of public infrastructure”, insisting on using sculpture to forge strong social and aesthetic identities for civic places as well as the large civic infrastructure systems that run our cities. His sculptures are built with careful attention to how sculpture integrates with landscape, creates public space and fosters social interaction between our private and public experiences during our everyday activities in public places.
Garten holds master’s degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design, in ceramic art, and Harvard Graduate School of Design, with distinction, in landscape architecture. He is the recipient of two Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation Fellowship for Individual Artists, the Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship, the Jerome Foundation Travelling Artist Grant, ,and the American Architecture Prize. His civic sculptures have consistently been selected as best in the nation by The Americans for the Arts and have been cited for design excellence by the American Society of Landscape Architects and CODAworx,CODAawards. Cliff Garten Studio’s projects have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Public Art Review, Landscape Architecture Magazine, the Architect’s Newspaper, and CODAworx. He was H.W.S. Cleveland Visiting Critic and Lecturer, UMN Landscape Architecture Program and Professor of Art at Hamline University, St. Paul, MN. He has also served as a visiting critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, Southern California Institute of Architecture, Otis Art Institute and Rhode Island School of Design.