Richard Deutsch is an award-winning California-based sculptor who creates abstract sculpture for both public and private settings. Deutsch has shaped a 30-year career fostering the imaginative inquiry required to design public art environments and sculptures of stone, water, bronze and stainless steel. His work is marked by an ease of understanding space and environment, meaning and purpose and his work is thought-provoking, accessible and -- through art’s intangible power -- builds community and sustains interest over time. The human experience, concept, layers of meaning, and the organization of form and space are all central to his exploration.
Born in Los Angeles in 1953, Deutsch received a BFA in fine arts from UC Santa Cruz and continued to hone his craft in the Bay Area after graduation. At the end of the 1980s Deutsch, like many sculptors, found numerous opportunities for large-scale public and private commissions, and his artistic practice began to migrate away from the production of large bodies of studio work into the seductive realm of the public plaza. The Art in Public Places movement offered him the chance to work in collaboration with other artists, architects, and engineers on site-specific projects of an even larger architectural scale.
Among Richard Deutsch’s commissions for sculpture and art-integrated environments are significant projects for Stanford University, the Oakland Museum of California and major urban plazas for San Francisco, Oakland, Washington DC, Arlington, VA, and The University of Delaware. His sculpture is in the permanent collection of San Francisco’s de Young Museum and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as the Oakland Museum, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, the Tucson Museum of Art and many public and private collections throughout the U.S.
In 2013, Americans For the Arts recognized Richard Deutsch’s project, Echo, Arlington, VA for “Excellence and Innovation in Public Art” and included Echo in the Top 50 Public Art Projects in the United States. Deutsch is the recipient of numerous prestigious art awards, including a fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, and an individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
