Pat Lasch (b. 1944, New York) is an American artist, living and working in New York and California, whose six-decade practice explores the self in relation to death, sexuality, interpersonal relationships, and family. Through sculptural forms such as cakes, ceremonial dresses, and sewn tondos, Lasch reclaims the languages of decoration and domestic labor to critique cultural structures. Her practice is particularly transformative today, exposing how ideals of beauty and womanhood can function not only as instruments of social control but also as powerful expressions of self.
She received a B.A. at Queens College, City University of New York, where her teachers included Richard Serra and Richard McDermott Miller. In the 1970s, Lasch became an early member of A.I.R. Gallery, the pioneering feminist artist-run cooperative in New York, where she exhibited for over a decade. Lasch has combined her life as a working artist with teaching at leading art schools, including Parsons and Rhode Island School of Design. She was appointed as the first female Professor of Sculpture at University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she taught for more than twenty years. Lasch earned her M.F.A. from Georgia State University in 1990.
In 1982, Lasch received the Rome Prize. Lasch’s work is included in major public collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Lasch was included in the historic 1972 13 Women Artists exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery amongst artists including Louise Bourgeois, Mary Miss, Alice Adams, and Kazuko. She has been the subject of monographic exhibitions, including Journeys of the Heart at Palm Springs Art Museum, which surveyed over four decades of her practice. Lasch is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Yaddo Residency, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Lasch has been in exhibitions at the SculptureCenter and P.S. 1 (now MoMA PS1) in New York, and was included in the influential Bad Girls show of feminist-inspired art at the New Museum in 1994.
Lasch’s life as an artist began in 1963, when, at nineteen, a married mother of an infant, she threw the vacuum cleaner down the stairs and informed her husband that she and the baby were leaving. After receiving her Bachelor of Arts from Queens College, she found artistic and feminist solidarity as an early member of Artists in Residence (A.I.R.), the first women’s art collective in the United States, emerging from the downtown New York art scene of the 1970s. Her participation in A.I.R. placed her within a generation of women artists challenging the exclusion of women from established artistic institutions and asserting their place within contemporary art.
The daughter of a German-born pastry chef and a seamstress, Lasch developed a distinctive visual language from the techniques and materials of her parents’ trades. Her father’s mantra, “If you make a mistake, put a rose on it,” became an enduring principle in her approach to making, allowing imperfection, concealment, and ornament to coexist within the work. Her mother’s sewing practices informed her meticulously stitched tondos consisting of concentric circles sewn on unprimed muslin. These works act as genealogical maps tracing twenty generations, with each tiny stitch representing an individual life. Functioning as meditations on the cyclical nature of existence, Lasch’s tondos visualize the accumulated histories of countless ancestors within a single identity. As the artist states, “In twenty generations, it takes over one million people to make each one of us. We are all related.”
In the 2010s, Lasch began concentrating on the possibilities of sculpting primarily with acrylic paint, creating works that transform the decorative vocabulary of pastry and fashion into a sculptural language that is at once seductive and subversive. Created from poured acrylic polymer paint and accentuated with glass beads and freshwater pearls, her ceremonial sculptures occupy the space between decorative art and fine sculpture, elevating materials traditionally associated with feminine labor while questioning the hierarchies that have historically separated craft from art. The artist pours, extrudes, and casts paint, to sculpt dresses made entirely of acrylic, without the inclusion of any fabric components.
For Lasch, these works are more than just objects of celebration. Rather, they record an experience of memory, expectation, and loss. Cakes and dresses are witnesses to the passage of a life, registering the rituals and rites of passage through which personal histories are formed, preserved, and shared. Lasch’s application of elaborate ornamentation underscores the complexity of the experiences her works commemorate, while highlighting the tension between beauty and its histories. Through works that address desire, sexuality, spirituality, mourning, and one’s passage through life, Lasch memorializes intimate aspects of a woman’s experience.
