Joyce McDaniel taught sculpture at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts for over thirty years. During that time she generated work for over two dozen solo and countless group exhibitions, co-founded the Boston Sculptors collective gallery and inspired hundreds of students to seek and find their artistic voices in three dimensions. The current offering at the Boston Sculptors Gallery, “An Ode to Joyce” couples a wide spectrum of Joyce’s work as it has evolved over the decades with the work of eleven of the hundreds of former students she has inspired and influenced over a like period of time. From her early welded steel work, inspired by her upbringing in Oklahoma, to her later constructions that combined expanded steel mesh, overlaid with delicate hand-made and dressmaker pattern paper, she showed an unusual willingness to push materials to their outer limits. The nineteen sculptures of hers that are included in this show demonstrate the breadth of her palette, the spectrum of materials and work by eleven of her former students show the broad range of her influence on the next generation of sculptors, just a few sprouts of the hundreds of seeds she cast as a teacher and role model.
-Ken Hruby