A set of matches, folding chairs, cracked sunglasses, spare light bulbs and a pair of boots lie scattered across Jud Nelson’s Fort Myers studio. “What do you see?” the artist asks. Upon closer inspection, what appears as workshop detritus reveals its true form—matches carved from patterned rock, chairs from Styrofoam. A hollowed-out slice of Wonder Bread, complete with minute flakes and indentations, betrays its true nature: Carrara marble.
The 81-year-old sculptor has lived in Southwest Florida quietly since 2000, when he left New York City to care for his ailing parents. Though Jud rarely exhibits today, he continues his craft with obsessive precision. His masterfully realistic sculptures—with some held by the Guggenheim Museum, U.S. Capitol and other institutions—maintain the technical acuity and surreal simplicity that positioned him within the art world zeitgeist for decades.
For the Midwestern artist, reality lives in the details. From his 1970s Styrofoam sculptures to later marble works rendering Hefty trash bags and hot dogs, Jud’s work exhibits surface textures meticulously sanded, chiseled and drilled into shape. “Surfaces are everything in sculpture. That’s what sculpture is all about,” he says. Rather than human subjects, he focuses on mass-produced goods, immortalizing the nuances of everyday objects that are often overlooked in our increasingly digital culture.
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Jud Nelson’s Holos Series 27, No. 3 (Light Bulbs) (1995)
Jud Nelson’s Holos Series 27, No. 3 (Light Bulbs) (1995)
The sculptor blurs high and low art, using prized Carrara marble to depict mundane objects, like bulging trash bags, Saltines and light bulbs. Above: On display at Musée Marmottan Monet’s Trompe-l’œil exhibit in Paris, Jud’s Carrara marble Holos Series 10, No. 4 (Shirts) exemplifies the sculptor’s command of reality-bending realism with lifelike folds and creases.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
jud nelson
Working in what he calls ‘reductive realism,’ Jud approaches each piece as an exercise in pure observation. His expertise lies in the art of seeing—scrutinizing subjects for delicate plays of light across surfaces, considering both physical attributes and emotional resonance. “What I’m seeing is all the birthmarks, how these objects came into existence. The smashing, the bending, the manipulation of the materials—I’m not seeing a mousetrap or this or that. I’m seeing this crazy object that’s been beat around into existence,” Jud says. He’ll spend months on the stitching for a marble shirt, adjusting the depth of each groove to ensure the curves and shadows align with its fabric counterpart.
The Holos series (1971-1998), named from the Greek word for ‘whole,’ captures his devotion to seeing objects as complete beings. In each piece, Jud presents six nearly identical items—mirroring standard consumer packaging—with subtle variations. In Holos Series 3 (Mousetraps), Styrofoam animal traps reveal distinctive imperfections: a spring closure skewing left; a base with a hairline crack. “This is a portrait. They’re all portraits,” he says.
Growing up in Fort Dodge, a gypsum mining and agricultural town in Iowa, Jud developed his knack for craftsmanship and ingenuity amid an eclectic mix of artistic and industrial influences. As a young man, he encountered a piece of discarded, claw-marked Styrofoam that sparked his fascination with material transformation. The synthetic substance proved an ideal medium for the modern sculptor—lightweight, malleable, versatile.
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Jud Nelson’s Holos Series 2, No. 6 (Glasses) (1975)
Jud Nelson’s Holos Series 2, No. 6 (Glasses) (1975)
Breaking from convention, Jud turned to Styrofoam and dental drills early in his career, achieving uncanny realism through polished surfaces and varied depths for renderings of sunglasses and folding chairs.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
at home with jud nelson
Jud began experimenting, chopping large slabs of foam into chunks. Careful not to apply too much pressure and crumble the delicate substance, he learned to work gradually—first carving rough shapes with his hands, then using a dental drill outfitted with varying bits to achieve fine-point textures and depths.
He went on to study painting at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where he recalls seeing Bob Rauschenberg’s 32-foot Barge installation at the city’s Walker Art Center. The mixed-media innovator’s silkscreen expanse reinforced Jud’s desire to diverge from conventional aesthetics.
By 1969, Jud had packed up a U-Haul and relocated to New York City. From a $29-a-month SoHo studio loft, he immersed himself in the city’s explosive counter-culture movement, consorting with postmodern influencers, including abstract minimalist Frank Stella, prominent art critic Barbara Rose, and Chuck Close, whose large-scale, hyper-realistic portraits were widely exhibited in prominent institutions until the mid-2010s, when sexual harassment allegations led museums to reconsider their presentation of his work.
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Jud Nelson’s Holos Series 3, No. 6 (Mousetraps) (1979)
Jud Nelson’s Holos Series 3, No. 6 (Mousetraps) (1979)
In 1982, The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum commissioned Jud to craft Man in Space, a bronze sculpture of an astronaut appearing weightless. Bottom: Holos Series 3, No. 6 (Mousetraps) reflects the slight variations in mass-produced objects.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
at home with jud nelson
Though Jud’s focus on mass-produced objects aligned with the Pop Art movement, he carved his own path, neither critiquing nor celebrating consumer culture and aiming to simply present subjects as they were. When contemporaries embraced industrial materials, he worked in Styrofoam. Later, as synthetic materials became standard, he turned to marble, reinventing the classical medium with mundane subjects like toilet paper and trash bags.
Works like Hefty 2-ply (1981) demonstrate his evolution. Taking inspiration from Giuseppe Sanmartino’s 1752 masterpiece Veiled Christ, where marble appears as a gossamer-thin fabric over a body, Jud captured the illusion of cleaner bottles and soda cans pressing against the plastic-looking surface. Holos Series 10, No. 1 (Shirts) (1985), currently at Musée Marmottan Monet’s Trompe-l’œil exhibit in Paris, uses varying degrees of polish—matte for fabric, glossier for buttons—to achieve textile-like realism. In Holos Series 27, Nos. 1-3 (Saltines) (1994), the artist uses rust to mimic toasted patches on Carrara marble crackers.
Moving from airy foam to heavy stone and metal, Jud became captivated by the idea of applying levity to denser mediums. In 1982, The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum commissioned him to sculpt Man in Space (1984), which still stands outside the Grand Rapids, Michigan, institution as an ode to the president’s support of space exploration.
Jud Nelson’s Holos Series 6, No. 2 (Popsicles) (1977)
Jud Nelson’s Holos Series 6, No. 2 (Popsicles) (1977)
Jud’s shift from Styrofoam to marble in the 1980s marked an evolution as he sought to expand the ancient material for a modern era. Sculptures of melting Popsicles reflect his elevation of consumer goods as objects of reverence.
Astronaut Alan Bean—a fellow artist and materials innovator—modeled the Apollo 5 space suit for two weeks as Jud studied his features and movements. “He would die if we cut the pipe,” Jud says, referencing the oxygen system required to sustain the suited astronaut. “But he did all of these motions so I could figure out what I’m going to do with this pancake [clay].” The 3,500-pound installation, cast in bronze from a plaster model, depicts a 9-foot-tall astronaut floating from a cylindrical Space Shuttle Hatch base, tethered by a bronze life support cord. The textured spacesuit surface mimics the wear-and-tear of space travel, while the posture suggests weightless flight. Other commissions followed, including a bust of Vice President Walter Mondale, which stands in the U.S. Capitol Building.
In the 1990s, Jud exhibited in a series of solo and group shows nationwide, positioning him as a leader of illusory art and sculptural greatness. In Fort Myers, institutions like the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (where, in 2003, Jud was able to meet the artist whose work had moved him at the Walker decades before), Alliance for the Arts and Sidney and Berne Davis Art Center celebrated his explorations of perception throughout the aughts and early 2010s.
Today, Jud’s vision remains unwavering as he carves out a new series of bologna slices and gears up for a new local exhibit, set to come in the next year. The sculptor’s ability to perceive transcends physical limitations, enriched by a lifetime of experiences informing his art and command of how materials—from foam to stone—can capture life’s overlooked details.