Walter Dusenbery

Born in 1939, in Alameda, California, Walter Dusenbery received his formal arts education from the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he earned an MFA in Sculpture. He has taught at the University of California Extension, Berkeley, the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University, and has also served as the Director of the Johnson Atelier, Stone Division.

First studying dance at Juilliard and ceramics with the Bauhaus instructor Marguerite Wildenhain, then repeatedly working his way to the Orient and back as a quartermaster on the U.S. flagship President Cleveland, Dusenbery ultimately earned his MFA in 1969. He returned to Japan where he was granted the unusual honor of being the first all- American sculptor to carve stone on the sacred island of Shikoku.

Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi took him on as assistant, and – in 1971 – introduced him to the stone-working areas of Italy. Dusenbery established his own studio in Pietrasanta, learning from Noguchi as Noguchi had learned from Brancusi and Brancusi had learned from Rodin.. More classically-inspired and attuned than Noguchi, Dusenbery’s focus is the intersection between sculpture and architecture – hearkening back to a lost period of art in which little differentiation was made between the two. With an affinity for the sweeping landscapes of parks and gardens, his structures exhibit a tension between the creation and occupation of space – blurring the most basic distinction between sculpture and architecture.

As the late British sculpture critic Tim Threlfall noted, Dusenbery’s work looks back to “a time when the architect and sculptor were one; when the building of an early shrine or temple was neither the sole province of the sculptor not the architect, but incorporated, without limiting boundaries, both arts in one seamless whole. The temple was perceived as an enclosure and as an object occupying space.” Yet there is also in Dusenbery’s sculpture, Threlfall added, “a sharp strain of irrationality;” and, a constant tension derives from the startling contrasts of organic and abstract forms, as well as classical and modernist philosophies, made resplendent in his work.

Walter Dusenbery has exhibited extensively in solo exhibitions, and his work has frequented important group shows throughout the world. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Augustus Saint-Gaudens Memorial Prize, the Deutscher Akademischer Austaschdienst, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Commissions he has been awarded include works for the Portland Justice Center, Portland, Oregon, and the Fulton County Government Building in Atlanta. His work resides in several of the world’s most impressive collections including the Jerusalem Foundation, Jerusalem, the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.