Judy Pfaff

Judy Pfaff
Born	1946 London
Education	Cass Technical High School
Alma mater	Washington University in St. Louis, Yale University
Style	Installation art
Awards	MacArthur Fellow

Judy Pfaff (born 1946 in London, England), is an American artist, known mainly for Installation art. Pfaff has received numerous awards for her work, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award (2004) and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts (1986). Major exhibitions have been held of her work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2002), Denver Art Museum (1994) and Saint Louis Art Museum (1989). In 2013 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Pfaff comes from a working-class background. Her father, a Royal Air Force pilot, was absent from her life. Pfaff's mother moved to Detroit soon after Pfaff's birth, leaving Pfaff and brother to be raised by their grandparents. Post-war London was bleak; Pfaff has described playing in bombed out and abandoned buildings, gathering "raw materials for fantasy buildings." A reunion in 1956 with her mother in Detroit, where she attended Cass Technical High School, did not end well. At age 15, Pfaff left home and eventually married a U.S. Air Force officer. She attended Wayne State University and Southern Illinois University, completing a BFA at Washington University in 1971.

When Pfaff enrolled in the MFA program at Yale University School of Art, she was significantly more mature in age and experience than many of her classmates. She embraced the use of heavy equipment and outsized materials and was influenced by other disciplines such as physics, medicine, zoology, and astronomy. She also participated in Process Art and the Pattern and Decoration movement which continued on in the future of her artwork.

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