Ursula von Rydingsvard, Sculptor of Monumental Cedar Forms, Dies at 84

Ursula von Rydingsvard, the sculptor who built monumental abstract forms from cedar beams, died on Tuesday morning, October 27, 2026, at her home in Manhattan. She was 84. Her studio manager, Courtney Childress, attributed the death to Alzheimer's disease, according to the New York Times. Childress also spoke to Hyperallergic by phone for its obituary, and ARTnews published its own obituary the same day.

From refugee camps to New York

She was born Ursula Karoliszyn on July 26, 1942, in Deensen, Germany, to a Polish mother and a Ukrainian father. As a child, she and her six siblings lived through the German occupation of Poland and then spent years in German refugee and displaced persons camps. The family later emigrated to the United States and settled in Plainville, Connecticut. She earned a BA and an MA from the University of Miami in 1965 and an MFA from Columbia University in New York in 1975.

Cedar, cut and stacked like brick

Von Rydingsvard became known for large sculptures built mainly from standard four by four cedar beams. She and her assistants marked the wood with pencils, cut it with circular saws and assembled the pieces like bricks into large, undulating forms. Some works were treated with graphite powder or chalk. Over a career of more than five decades, her abstract cedar works ranged from an assembly of cones to a tornado shaped form 17 feet tall, made from about 15,000 pounds of wood. Cedar stayed at the center of her practice, alongside later work in bronze, resin and textiles.

She also set her work apart from Minimalism. "There was no sexiness, and there wasn't even any humanity," she told curator Mark Rosenthal, according to the account of her view carried in the obituaries.

Work in public places

Her major permanent commissions are on view at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, at Storm King Art Center in New York, at the Bloomberg Building in New York, at the Queens Family Courthouse, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City and at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Her outdoor solo exhibition at Madison Square Park in New York ran in 2006, and her most extensive exhibition to that date was held at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2014 to 2015.

Honours and a studio remembered

Von Rydingsvard was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2008 and was featured in Art21, Art in the Twenty-First Century, on PBS. Her honours included a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize.

Childress remembered her energy in the studio this way: "She was like the sun. She was this force that pulled people in and kept them orbiting around her. She moved through the studio like her hair was on fire, and could never slow down."