DeWitt Godfrey is a sculptor based in Poolville, New York who transforms thin sheets of steel into large-scale hollow cylindrical forms stacked together so as to emphasize the compressible, spongy characteristic of this medium. Godfrey usually sets his sculptures within exterior settings – wedged bewteen or against buildings, trees or cascading across open green space – these communities of elements comment on the singular stand-alone ideal that underlie the aesthetics of much modern sculpture. Through the emphasis of negative space, the artist leaves his work open to the viewer, allowing one to walk through and around his sculpture. This use of transparency not only asserts sculpture as an accessible medium but it counters the stoic didacticism of the past, seen most recently in works from Minimalism.

Claverack (2007) appears on a private residence and consists of nine oblong, rusty steel shapes that are pressed between two trees while Concordia (2012) features twelve hollow barrels stacked above the roof of the Downtown Art Center located along Main Street in Lexington, Kentucky. Godfrey accentuates the restrictions posted by architectural space in Layman (2012), where the outlines of ten cylindrical components are wedged under a park bridge and seen only as a group of dark silhouettes. Most impressive is Lincoln (2012) that extends 150 feet across the DeCordova Sculpture Park. Standing as high as 15-feet, this piece rests on a decline within the field imbuing this massive work with the idea of movement. In each case, these sculptures abut structure and rhyme with it rather than appearing as stand-alone, isolated objects.

DeWitt Godfrey is an Associate Professor of Sculpture in the Department of Art and Art History at Colgate University. In 2014 he will complete Waverly, a sculptural commission by the Public Art Office and the Cambridge Arts Council in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1984 he has been the recipient of numerous awards, grants and fellowships from institutions such as the National Endowment of the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Japan Foundation and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. His art appears in the collections of the Estee Lauder Group in New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, PaineWebber in New York City and the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York.