Ursula von Rydingsvard, Sculptor of Cedar Monuments, Dies at 84

Ursula von Rydingsvard, the sculptor who spent more than five decades carving monumental works from cedar beams, died at 84 in her Manhattan home on the morning of October 27. Her studio manager, Courtney Childress, attributed the death to Alzheimer's disease, according to the New York Times.

Von Rydingsvard built her career by chipping away at enormous cedar beams, producing a menagerie of massive sculptures. The range was wide: an assembly of cones; a 17-foot-tall, tornado-shaped behemoth made from 15,000 pounds of wood. Cedar was her signature, but not her only material. She also worked in bronze, textiles, and animal intestines, according to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, which documents her materials and career.

The scale of the work had a biographical root. Von Rydingsvard was born in 1942 in Deensen, Germany, in the middle of World War II, to a Polish mother and a Ukrainian father. When the war ended in 1945, her family of nine moved through eight camps — Nazi slave-labor camps and postwar refugee camps — before taking a military ship to the United States in 1950. She described this history herself, in an interview with Art21, and repeatedly cited her childhood as a significant source of inspiration for the sculptures.

What made her studio run?

Childress, who managed the studio and confirmed the circumstances of the artist's death, gave Hyperallergic a portrait of Von Rydingsvard at work in a phone interview. Two of her descriptions stand as testimony to the artist's intensity.

• "She was like the sun. She was this force that pulled people in and kept them orbiting around her."
• "She moved through the studio like her hair was on fire, and could never slow down."

Both quotes come from someone who worked with her daily, which makes them unusual in an obituary context: they describe not the monuments but the person who demanded them.

What does her death change for sculpture?

The immediate answer is that one of the few artists working at true architectural scale in wood is gone. A career of over five decades, a 15,000-pound tornado form, a 17-foot height — these numbers describe an practice that required industrial cedar supply, a functioning studio team, and physical endurance over years. That combination is not easily replaced.

The longer answer concerns reception. Von Rydingsvard's biography — born in wartime Germany, displaced through eight camps, immigrant at eight years old — sat directly beneath the abstract surfaces of her sculptures. She said so herself. With her death, the reading of that connection now passes to museums, historians, and the estate; how rigorously they hold to her own account of the work, rather than softening it into general myth, will shape what her monuments mean to the next audience.