Michael Beatty: Fabrications
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA • holycross.edu • Through April 1, 2025
Professor Emeritus Michael Beatty considers himself “a maker of objects.” Thus, Fabrications is just the right name for this exhibition, which combines his “sculptures” alongside drawings, prints, and study models. The engaging display spotlights Beatty’s playfully philosophical output, from 1992 to the present.
In the Visual Arts Department at Holy Cross, Beatty taught sculpture and 3-D design for twenty-five years, before retiring in 2023. His works are an amalgam of techniques and materials, influences and themes. For Beatty, an interdisciplinary crafts maker, process is key. He’ll start with a doodle or a sketch, use technology-assisted methods to visualize his ideas, and give them shape using wood, steel, and 3-D printing.
Beatty considers his work “drawings in space.” In Twist/Hold, a narrow ribbon of bent laminated wood supported by skinny steel “girders” looks like a minimalist roller coaster. It’s graceful and soothing. In a trio of drawings, Beatty connects a strong geometric line with a curvilinear shape, thus uniting rigid and flowing forms. Beatty gives this approach a second life—in 3D—with two small sculptures of welded steel and laminated wood.
Three small objects from Beatty’s birch plywood “Core” series, which is inspired by CT scans, resemble botanical shapes, and thus link body and nature. In Plato’s Chalkboard, a series of monotypes produced in collaboration with printmaker James Stroud of Center Street Studio, Beatty calls forth floating, wire-like objects that visualize the theories about three-dimensional shapes that Plato posited—without illustrations.
Another series, “Blips,” is comprised of small, lathe-turned bulbous objects covered in graphite. Inspired by cosmic images from the Hubble telescope, these playful extensions of Beatty’s fundamental forms are arrayed in out-of-the-way spaces throughout the show.
A special highlight of the exhibition, a mock-up of Beatty’s studio, unveils his iterative and experimental process of making. It’s filled with sketches, maquettes, prototypes, and works in progress—all in conversation with each other.
The fabrications dreamed up by Beatty invoke feelings of wonder. “Beatty’s abstract works,” says gallery director Lauren Szumita, “are inspired by very real things—in nature, architecture, space, and the human form. There are traces of something familiar that are just out of reach. Beatty wants us to be comfortable with not finding out the answers, but to think about our experience.”
— Jack Curtis