Joel Elias Shapiro (born September 27, 1941, in New York City) is an American sculptor celebrated for his expressive use of simple rectangular forms. Often associated with Minimalism, Shapiro’s early work is defined by material-driven compositions that do not reference external subjects, adhering to the core principles of the movement. He currently lives and works in New York City and is married to fellow artist Ellen Phelan.
Shapiro’s artistic perspective was profoundly shaped during his time in the Peace Corps in India, where he encountered an abundance of traditional Indian art. He has credited this experience with awakening his commitment to becoming an artist, explaining that in India, “Art was pervasive and integral to the society,” and that Indian sculpture became a model for exploring “real psychological states” in his work. His early sculptures also reflect influences from Greek art and were often small in scale. However, Shapiro has emphasized that these works were not simply “small” but engaged with the idea of scale as a conceptual and emotional tool. According to Shapiro, “Scale is a very active thing that’s changing and altering as time unfolds, consciously or unconsciously… you can have something small that has big scale.” In these early pieces, he sought to describe emotional states such as longing and desire.
During this formative period, Shapiro was also influenced by the conceptual and material strategies of artists such as Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and Donald Judd. By the 1980s, he began working with larger, life-size forms that retained the influence of Indian and Greek sculpture, while also drawing inspiration from early modernists like Edgar Degas and Constantin Brâncuși.
As his career progressed, Shapiro increasingly explored dynamic representations of the human form. His figures—often abstracted into geometric planes—evoke motion and energy, depicting poses such as dancing, crouching, or falling. These sculptures engage themes of balance, projection, cantilever, and compression, and often appear to hover or fall through space, defying gravity. Shapiro has described this shift as a desire to create work “that stood on its own, and wasn’t limited by architecture and by the ground and the wall and right angles.” One example of this evolution is his large-scale bronze sculpture at the Hood Museum of Art, an elongated form that leans dramatically over a walkway, energizing the surrounding space with its tension and movement. Like all of Shapiro’s mature works, the piece is untitled.
A Jewish artist, Shapiro has acknowledged that Jewish traditions inform his practice, including his frequent use of the color blue, a hue rich in cultural and spiritual meaning.
