The Downtown Dinner 2025

Michael Richards Award for Visual Art

Jean Shin

Known for her sprawling and often public sculptures, artist Jean Shin transforms accumulations of discarded objects into powerful monuments that interrogate our complex relationship between material consumption, collective identity and community engagement. Often working cooperatively within a community or region, Shin amasses vast collections of an everyday object or material—Mountain Dew soda bottles, mobile phones, 35mm slides—while researching its history of use, circulation and environmental impact. Distinguished by this labor-intensive and participatory process, Shin’s epic creations become catalysts for communities to confront social and ecological challenges. Recent projects focus more closely on sculptural forms that employ organic elements–namely fallen trees—that exist within natural environments. As such, her body of work includes several permanent public artworks commissioned by major agencies and municipalities, such as the MTA’s Second Ave Subway in NYC, Brooklyn Public Library, and the Perelman Arts Center, World Trade Center, NYC. Born in Seoul, South Korea, and raised in the US, Shin works in Brooklyn and Hudson Valley, New York. She is a tenured Adjunct Professor at Pratt Institute and holds an honorary doctorate from New York Academy of Art. Shin’s work has been widely exhibited and collected in over 150 major museums and cultural institutions, including solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, and Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, where in 2020 she was the first Korean-American woman artist featured in a solo exhibition. Shin has received numerous awards, including the Frederic Church Award for her contributions to American art and culture. Her works have been highlighted in The New York Times and Sculpture Magazine, among others.