South End Art Hop visitors musing on this year’s theme — abstract expressionism — might envision young artists in midcentury New York City lofts, creating expansive artworks that would end up defining the bold American art of the second half of the 20th century. That history is a lot closer to Burlington’s South End than you might think.
Just ask David Stoltz.
Stoltz’s cubicle at Generator Makerspace is a far cry from the 5,000-square-foot SoHo studio where he worked a half-century ago, but his ideas are still momentous. His Generator space is packed with sculptures, drawings and stained-glass panels, all depicting cartoonish characters in steel, wood, plaster and 3D-printed plastic. Many of the works are brightly colored, and all have a dynamic sense of movement. While some are reminiscent of characters from George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” comics, and others suggest volumetric versions of Keith Haring’s cartoons, they are wholly original.
Asked where his characters came from, Stoltz, 82, said that during his youth in Brooklyn, his mom was friends with comics and performers such as Danny Kaye. “He used to come over with Mel Brooks for dinner,” Stoltz said in his unquestionably Brooklyn accent. Jimmy Durante, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé were good friends, too.
“We had no money,” Stoltz said with a chuckle. “Our father drove a truck. But there was always laughter and joy and characters.”
In the 1960s, Stoltz received a scholarship to the Skowhegan school in Maine, where he studied sculpture. Soon after, the director of the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts recommended him to famed British sculptor Henry Moore. In his early twenties, Stoltz and his then-wife, Louise Peabody, moved to England for a year, where he helped out in Moore’s studio and met artists such as sculptors Anthony Caro and Phillip King. Stoltz reconnected with several of them as an artist-in-residence at Bennington College in the early 1970s, also befriending the critic Clement Greenberg.
After that, things took off for Stoltz. Three of his monumental bent-steel works are in the collection of the prestigious Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Detroit Institute of Arts and National Museum of Australia hold others. His European shows included a major exhibition in Paris. A photograph from Sculpture Space in Utica, N.Y., shows Stoltz surrounded by an installation of what appear to be 3D wiggly lines, as though he’s been sucked into a doodle.
When Montpelier artist Chris Jeffrey first encountered Stoltz at Generator, he said, he noted his talent and looked him up online. “The first picture that came up was from a long time ago — him and David Hockney in Hockney’s swimming pool in California,” Jeffrey said.
Jeffrey said Stoltz mentioned hanging out with famed sculptors Richard Serra and Donald Judd in Judd’s studio, which was a couple of blocks from Stoltz’s. Over several decades, Stoltz has created dozens of drawings for and of late painter Chuck Close, another good friend, which he has assembled into a book. Some of these poignant works are abstract, with nods to Close’s signature style, and some directly address the paralyzed artist’s disability.
Most of the works on view in Stoltz’s studio, however, are related to his decades-long project “A Ride on the Carousel: a Circus of Life,” in which characters whirl around a central post under a dome topped by a winged creature. He started the first version, a small clay carousel, in 1987, the night he separated from Peabody. During that personal crisis and the financial crash of the same era, which affected the art market and changed Stoltz’s fortunes dramatically, he began developing the characters that populate the sculpture.
Stoltz links the idea of a carousel as a metaphor for life to the 12th-century Sufi poem “The Conference of the Birds,” in which different aspects of the self are articulated as birds on a spiritual quest. In the 1960s, he said, he and Peabody studied under a disciple of the mystic and philosopher George Gurdjieff, who based his ideas in Sufism.
But mostly, Stoltz asserted, the sculpture is abstract: It is about weight, balance, negative and positive space. It’s definitely not about entertainment. “It was a catharsis,” he said.
Long after selling his loft, Stoltz came up to Burlington to work on a piece with Matt Penney, one of the founders of Pine Street Studios, who offered him a residency and suggested he use Generator’s facilities. That was two months before the pandemic hit. Stoltz ended up staying in Burlington, where he has collaborated with many other artists, some of whom helped him create forms for the 6-by-6-foot version of the carousel currently on view in his studio.
Seamus Hannan and Alex Hahl assisted Stoltz with computerized fabrication tools; Jeffrey created stained-glass panels based on Stoltz’s drawings. Stoltz also worked closely with woodworker Alex Brumlik on a large character sculpture for a Vermont collector.
Stoltz expressed the same warmth and appreciation for these locals’ talents as he did for some of the best-known artists of the last century. He sees them as all working to solve the same sorts of problems he has spent 60 years considering: how to maintain a career, explore meaning, practice a craft and balance abstract forms.
“He really was the real deal,” Jeffrey said. “And I think he still is the real deal.”
David Stoltz studio at Generator Makerspace, 40 Sears Lane in Burlington. davidstoltz.com
The original print version of this article was headlined “A Real Character | David Stoltz brings art world cred and craft to his South End studio”
This article appears in Art Hop Guide 2025.
