Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Performance
Website: stephenlichty.info
Stephen Lichty was born in 1983 in Kansas City, Missouri, and studied at the Department of Culture and Communications at New York University. He now lives and works in San Francisco, where he maintains a sculpture and performance practice that has been shown internationally since the early 2010s.
Lichty has held three solo exhibitions at Foxy Production in New York (2014, 2016, and 2021), along with solo shows at Veda in Florence (2020), Adams and Ollman in Portland (2019), Erik Nordenhake in Stockholm (2017), and CAPITAL in San Francisco (2015). His work has appeared in group exhibitions including Museum of Stones: Ancient and Contemporary Art at The Noguchi Museum in Queens (2015) and Intuition, curated by Axel Vervoordt at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice during the 2017 Venice Biennale. In 2018, he completed a public art commission for the Monticello Library in Shawnee, Kansas, in collaboration with Jim Woodfill. Alongside his sculptural work, Lichty has developed a body of performances, several made in collaboration with disability-culture artist Neil Marcus, presented at venues including ODC in San Francisco, the Neutra VDL Research House in Los Angeles, and Socrates Sculpture Park in New York.
In 2026, Lichty opened Ghost Stone, his first solo exhibition with YveYANG Gallery in New York, a site-specific project built from quartz, smelted iron sand, and pine resin sourced from a defunct Gold Rush-era mine in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Lichty’s sculptures and assemblages carry forward a Minimalist vocabulary of rectangular planes, conical forms, and repeated modular units, but his interest lies less in pure form than in the allusive qualities of materials, placements, and processes — configurations that invite symbolic, ritualistic, or personal readings. Working across concrete, crushed granite, stainless steel, and found or hand-processed natural materials, he treats his source matter as something to be collaborated with rather than merely shaped, an approach he has linked to Robert Smithson’s idea of the artist as a “geological agent.”
His recent work leans further into this material intimacy: a quartz stone worked by hand with dental tools and water picks over years to accelerate its own erosion, a bell cast from iron sand gathered on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach and smelted by a metallurgist collaborator, and site-specific installations of pine-resin-coated glass that flood a room with amber light. Lichty has traced this sensibility to childhood memories of church — stained glass, incense, candlelight — and his objects and installations often carry a quiet, devotional atmosphere even as they engage directly with histories of extraction, land use, and ecological damage.
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