Allyson Vieira, born 1979, is an American artist whose sculptural practice examines how forms, materials, and the labor that shapes them endure, erode, and transform over time. Working with materials such as plaster, concrete, metal, drywall, and marble, she explores the relationship between the body, architecture, and history, where gestures of construction and decay become inseparable. Her works build on the visual and philosophical legacies of classical antiquity and post-minimalism, from Polykleitos to Robert Smithson, reframing these traditions through a contemporary lens.

Vieira’s sculptures, installations, rubbings, and videos often preserve the marks of their making, treating the act of construction itself as both an aesthetic and conceptual field. The resulting forms evoke ruins, relics, and unfinished structures, oscillating between monumentality and fragility, permanence and collapse. In the «Siga-Siga» exhibition, works such as «Effective Communication» (2025), the series of «Gorgoneion» rubbings, and carved marble pieces explore the tension between endurance and transience, classical form and contemporary debris, the monumental and the provisional.

The major monograph on her work, «Allyson Vieira: The Plural Present» (eds. K. Marta and S. Castets, Karma Books, 2016), accompanied her institutional projects in Basel and New York. She is also the author of «On the Rock: The Acropolis Interviews» (Soberscove Press), a collection of conversations with the master marble workers of the Acropolis restoration, supported by the Graham Foundation, the Henry Moore Foundation, and FLACC. In 2024–25, Vieira was awarded a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Fellowship to conduct technical and pedagogical research in Greece, further engaging with traditional marble carving and material transmission through studying at the Higher School of Fine Arts & Marble Craftsmanship in Panormos, Tinos.

At the intersection of past and present, Vieira’s sculptures carry the weight of history while gesturing toward what is yet to unfold, offering viewers a meditation on labor, material, and the traces of human making.

Allyson Vieira’s work investigates how materials, forms, and labor carry histories, endure, and transform over time. Her practice bridges classical references, such as columns and steles, with contemporary materials like plaster, concrete, drywall, marble, and construction debris. In doing so, she creates a dialogue between the monumental past and the everyday present. Vieira often incorporates the marks of making into her work, allowing chisel strokes, rubbings, and traces of labor to remain visible. This emphasis on process underscores her interest in how objects evolve, decay, and communicate across time.Her work also draws attention to the fragility of urban life entangled in cycles of construction and decay. Vieira’s sculptures, installations, and rubbings treat the physical act of making as both conceptual and aesthetic, inviting viewers to consider the passage of time, the human scale of labor, and the ongoing conversation between history and contemporary life.