Overview

In Ravens: Spirits of the Sky, Joan Danziger’s sculpture occupies the museum with commanding intensity. Their exaggerated forms, iridescent surfaces, and suspended gestures place them somewhere between realism and abstraction, between sculpture and symbol. These are not the clever birds of natural history, but augurs, tricksters, familiars.

Their mythic resonance is heightened by scale and positioning, which invite viewers to encounter them as enigmatic beings charged with meaning. Danziger offers no fixed narrative. Instead, the Ravens communicate through presence—looming, watching, waiting—compelling us to project our own associations onto their vibrant shapes.  

To paraphrase Claes Oldenburg, Danziger’s ravens do more than sit on their perch in the museum. They transform it. They inhabit the threshold between the known and the imagined. 

Joan Danziger’s work invites us to reimagine the animal world not as a subject to be observed, but as a mirror of our own inner landscapes. Her sculptures do not simply represent; they loom. They haunt, hunt, and hover, suspended between worlds.