Mr. Cliff Garten
Internationally recognized artist Cliff Garten has completed more than fifty sculpture commissions throughout the U.S. and Canada. Garten’s artistic approach toward civic sculpture explores the expressive potential of infrastructure. He places his sculpture within the everyday as a way to re-imagine how civic infrastructure might perform beyond its basic function. By connecting people to places through sculptural material, social history and ecology, his civic sculptures locate the latent potential within a public space.
Garten is the recipient of two Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation Fellowship for Individual Artists and Leadership Fellowship and the Jerome Foundation Travelling Artist Grant. His civic sculptures have consistently been named best in the nation by The Americans for the Arts Public Art Network and have been cited for design excellence by the American Society of Landscape Architects. Garten has served as a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, UCLA School of Architecture, Otis Art Institute and SCI-Arc. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Landscape Architecture with Distinction from Harvard Graduate School of Design. Garten lives and works in Venice, California.