Stephen Shaheen is a Brooklyn-based artist who trained in Siena, Italy as a stone sculptor before earning his MFA from the New York Academy of Art. He works across stone, photography, and installation, with marble remaining central to his practice, which is based between New York, upstate Connecticut, and Carrara, Italy.
Shaheen’s work reconsiders marble as a material of vulnerability and transience. Often carved thin, suspended, or fragmented, it challenges the material’s historical association with permanence and monumentality. Across objects and environments, he explores how matter carries time, memory, and embodied experience.
As part of his sculptural practice, he produces objects that extend these investigations into the realm of use. Carved from stone and wood, these works emerge from the same concerns with weight, fragility, translucency, and geological time. Conceived as sculptures first, function remains secondary rather than determining form.
His work has been exhibited in institutions and galleries internationally, with large-scale pieces sited in both public and private collections. He is a recipient of grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the La Fortuna Foundation/Italian Cultural Institute, and has held residencies at the Vermont Sculpture Center and the Digital Stone Project. Shaheen directs an annual residency in Carrara, Italy for New York Academy of Art MFA awardees and has lectured at institutions including Princeton University, the American Institute of Architects, Dartmouth College, and the RISD Museum.
Photos courtesy of Martin Hyers