Sculpture culture: The Las Vegas Art Museum features the work of sculptor Essie Pinsker

Anne Hosier

Thursday, Dec. 4, 1997 | 9:50 a.m.

The art directors and writers who used to drop by Essie Pinsker's New York office always wondered why the forty-something public relations executive didn't just face it: her true calling was art, not P.R.

"They'd say to me, 'What're you doing in this stupid business? Why don't you become a full-time sculptor?' "

The president of her own public relations firm, Pinsker had already tackled more than a half dozen other careers, including modeling, merchandising, advertising, teaching, consulting, reporting and editing. "I knew I wanted to do something creative but I had to earn a living."

For years, Pinsker had satisfied her artistic yearnings in her spare time, studying painting and sculpting at adult education courses. On weekends, she holed up in her Union Square studio where she painted, worked clay models, cast bronze figures and chiseled smooth, bold shapes from massive slabs of marble.

Some of her techniques she had learned from her classes at the Art Students League and the New School for Social Research at New York University. Other methods she had picked up from the master marble carvers she had studied with in Pietrasanta, Italy. "I was very dedicated," Pinsker says. "I don't know what drove me."

Then one day, prompted by her clients' comments, she decided to take a chance.

Dressed in a sweatshirt and worn pants to conceal her high-fashion background, Pinsker shopped her portfolio to gallery owners up and down Madison Avenue. By the end of the second week, she happened upon a gallery owner who was excited by her work and wanted to hold a one-woman showing. "We had a very good reception," she says, of her 1981 exhibition at Bodley Gallery on Madison Avenue. "We almost had to have two shows."

A year later, Pinsker had made up her mind to sell her business and begin sculpting full-time. "I don't want to die an efficient business machine," she told her husband. "I want to die an artist."

Pinsker in Vegas

Now, more than a decade later, Pinsker is being honored with the Las Vegas exhibition, a major lifetime retrospective. "I was thrilled ... it's a dream," she says of the invitation, which James Mann, curator of the Las Vegas Art Museum, extended to her last July. "I didn't think Las Vegas would have such a prestigious museum and when I saw the building I just couldn't get over it."

The exhibition, which opened last month and runs through Jan. 10, features sculptures from the six series that have dominated Pinsker's career. There are abstract/figurative pieces from her early days; bulbous-shaped works representing the evolution of man; solid geometric configurations inspired by the mythological tale of the "Gordian Knot;" and more recent models designed for public spaces, to name a few.

"I went through a whole period where I did biblical things -- (such as) 'Isaiah,' " Pinsker says, referring to a black marble piece which will be acquired by the UCLA Medical Center when the show ends. "And then there's the spiritual, metaphysical stuff in a series called 'Other Realities,' because every person has a different reality."

All the pieces are either bronze, aluminum, or Pinsker's favorite medium, marble. "I liked the stuff that was really strong that you couldn't see through, that had a great deal of majesty."

With her bold, semi-abstract shapes, Pinsker hopes to communicate a sense of "meaning."

"I want someone to look at my work and feel something. I don't care if they hate it," she says. "I want to communicate. Maybe it's the beauty of a line, maybe it's the pose of a body that says 'I'm suffering,' and the person looking at it thinks 'I feel that way too' ... I think most people get something out of my work."

Recognition and rewards

That appears to be the case, judging by the recognition Pinsker's work has received in recent years.

Among the honors she's earned are Sculpture Awards in the Knickerbocker Artist 24th Annual Exhibition and the Metropolitan Art Show; solo exhibitions at Vorpal Gallery in Soho and the Left Bank Gallery in Laguna Beach, Calif.; and appearances in group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe.

In 1981, David Mann, then-owner of the Bodly Gallery on Madison Avenue where Pinsker held her one-woman show, wrote: "Pinsker's sensitivity to line within the sculptured form is powerful, strong and poetic."

Several years ago, Pinsker was approached by members of the "Anne Frank in the World" committee, a group dedicated to preserving the history of the Holocaust. The members had seen a model of one of Pinsker's commissioned sculptures, entitled "Mother and Child," and wanted to know if they could use the piece as a humanitarian award. Pinsker, who had already done a considerable amount of volunteer work for the group, found this rather presumptuous. "I told them, 'Get lost!' "

The group persisted, so Pinsker countered with an offer to make a flame sculpture, which she felt would be a more appropriate, and simpler, piece. "I thought, what does a mother and child have to do with the Holocaust?" she says. "It made me feel so foolish -- there has to be some connection."

But the members were adament: they wanted the "Mother and Child."

Exasperated, Pinsker let the matter rest. Then one night, "God taps me on the shoulder and says 'What shows man's humanity to man more than a mother's love for a child?' "

Pinsker took her flash of insight as a divine sign, and relented, asking to whom the humanitarian award would be presented. She was hardly prepared for the reply: Hollywood Director Stephen Spielberg. "I almost dropped off my chair."

Pinsker subsequently made two other identical pieces for the co-producers of "Schindler's List," and later presented a third to First Lady Hillary Clinton.

"I was always surprised that people responded so well to my work," she says, noting that her sculpture is now displayed in 21 museums. "I've always had self doubt."

Sculpting a path

Self doubt certainly doesn't appear to have deterred Pinsker from going after what she wants, however.

As a young woman looking for a way to finance her college education, she talked her way into jobs at Macy's and Ohrbach's in New York. Later, she flipped through the yellow pages and found a position as a model in a garment center showroom.

"It was wonderful because I made some money, but it really wasn't me. I was basically a very searching, intellectual kind of person," she says. "I realized I didn't want to be a hunk of flesh walking around in clothes."

Realizing that "the only way a woman can get ahead in the fashion business ... was to be a buyer in a department store," Pinsker then signed on as an assistant at Arkwright, Inc., where she quickly worked her way up to being a buyer. "I was born with the executive gene."

Pinsker continued to work even after she got married and had children, although she encountered plenty of hostility and "nasty remarks" about being a working woman. At one point, she scoured the yellow pages for a fashion editing job, getting all the way to Women's Wear Daily under "W" before winning an interview. The job paid less than the cost of Pinsker's housekeeper, but she took it anyway. "Sometimes I look back on this stuff and think 'what was I doing?' But it was what I had to do to get to where I am today."

Along the way, Pinsker suffered a bout with a serious illness, which made her reconsider her somewhat atheistic views. "That makes you start asking what it's all about."

As she began exploring her spiritual side, in both her personal life and work, she found it easier to create. "You begin to understand that if you get yourself out of the way, and let the creative force, whatever that is -- people can say it's God, people can say it's energy, whatever -- (take over) you get to the point where you can trust your intuition."

That's not to say sculpting has become easy, however. Of all her careers, Pinsker ranks this as her most challenging.

"How do you come up with something to say that nobody else has said before? Concept is the most challenging thing of all.

"It's like giving birth."

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