Sydney Carpenter

Sydney “Syd” Carpenter is a Philadelphia sculptor and professor whose powerful work focuses on African American farms and gardens.

During Carpenter’s career, she has been a resident artist at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Penland School of Crafts, Anderson Ranch, the Vermont Studio School and the Watershed Center. Her poignant sculptures focus on African American farms and gardens to highlight the history of African Americans’ relationship to the land. She does this by referencing natural growth and productivity in the subject matter, drawing on family histories of farming and forming her work from the earth itself in its clay medium. This inspiration results from her travels to China, Ghana, Brazil, West Africa, Indonesia and Central America.

Carpenter has been honored with awards and fellowships, including a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, Leeway Foundation Grants, National Endowment for the Arts and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships. Carpenter’s work has been proudly displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian, Fuller Craft Museum, the Tang Museum of Skidmore College, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, the James A. Michener Art Museum, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Swedish National Museum, all of which have acquired her work for their permanent collections. This year, Carpenter created a permanent outdoor garden installation for the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia, with an upcoming garden for The Colored Girls Museum.

Carpenter has been a professor of studio art at Swarthmore College since 1991, where she currently holds the Endowed Peggy Chan Professorship of Black Studies. Carpenter received her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.