Judy Pfaff British, b. 1946

Judy Pfaff (born 1946) is an American artist known mainly for installation art and sculptures, though she also produces paintings and prints. Pfaff has received numerous awards for her work, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004 and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts. Major exhibitions of her work have been held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Denver Art Museum and Saint Louis Art Museum. In 2013 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She attended Wayne State University and Southern Illinois University, completing a BFA at Washington University in St. Louis in 1971.

Pfaff enrolled in the MFA program at Yale University School of Art, where she embraced the use of heavy equipment and outsized materials. Other disciplines, such as physics, medicine, zoology and astronomy, also influenced her work. At Yale, Pfaff studied with Al Held, who became her mentor. With Held's encouragement, she created an installation for her final project. She completed her MFA in 1973 and then moved to New York City.

Since the 70s, Pfaff has helped redefine contemporary notions of sculpture and has been recognized for her innovative approach to space. While others at the time subscribed to minimalist art forms, Pfaff began making colorful, visually active environments that encompassed an entire gallery and complicated the relationship between sculpture and the architecture that contained it.

Spanning across mediums such as painting, printmaking, sculpture and installation, it can be described as "painting in space".Pfaff draws upon spiritual, botanical, and art historical imagery, and "explores issues of creativity and the complexity of life by using strings, vines, spheres, and other objects arranged in a seemingly haphazard way". Although, Pfaff has so far refused to give narrative meaning to her work, which shows an "urgent and ferocious need to labor for the visual and tactile […] in an era where language dominates artistic activity".

Pfaff incorporates a range of everyday and industrial materials into her installations such as wire, plastic tubing, fabric, steel, fiberglass, and plaster as well as salvaged signage and tree roots. Her interest in natural motifs extends to a series of prints integrating vegetation, maps, and medical illustrations. She has also used her dramatic sculptural abilities to make set designs for several theatrical stage productions. In recent years, she has incorporated photographic and digital imagery into her installations and prints.