The Hood Museum: Artist Talk: Janet Echelman (Noli Timere)

Sculptor Janet Echelman talks about her practice of melding art, engineering, and climate data.

Janet Echelman sculpts at the scale of buildings and city blocks, creating large-scale, fluid installations that merge art, architecture and engineering to anchor public spaces across five continents. Her work transforms with wind and light, inviting viewers into immersive experiences rather than static observation. Echelman uses unlikely materials—from atomized water particles to fiber stronger than steel—blending traditional craft with advanced computational design. Echelman's unconventional path includes five years living in a Balinese village, graduate studies in both painting and psychology, and teaching at MIT, Harvard and Princeton. Oprah ranked Echelman's work #1 on her List of 50 Things That Make You Say Wow!, and she received the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in Visual Arts, honoring "the greatest innovators in America today."

There will be a book signing after the talk. Books will…