Exhibition Review & Studio Visit Feature: Don Porcaro and his “Lost Stories” at Westwood Gallery

Installation view of Don Porcaro: Lost Stories at Westwood Gallery, The Bowery. © Westwood Gallery NYC / Artwork © Don Porcaro

By LIAM OTERO January 21st, 2026

Sourcing materials borne from the earth is one of the most direct-to-nature experiences a sculptor can reap. Don Porcaro (American, b. 1950) has spent nearly a lifetime devoting his energies to the acquisition of stones from disparate geographies that each embody their own unique patterns, colors, and textures which are then reconfigured into stacked formations. Westwood Gallery recently exhibited a voluminous selection of Porcaro’s sculptures in his second solo exhibition with the gallery, Lost Stories, which honed in on two strains of his output: towering, multi-layered sculptural pillars from his Lost Stories series followed by a medley display of mysterious objects resembling ancient or extraterrestrial artifacts from the Art or Fact series. James Cavello, co-founder of Westwood Gallery, curated this exhibition and was also responsible for curating Porcaro's first solo exhibition with the gallery, Time Will Tell, in 2023.

Installation view of Don Porcaro: Lost Stories at Westwood Gallery, The Bowery. © Westwood Gallery NYC / Artwork © Don Porcaro

The Lost Stories are polylithic sculptures, which are either of the scale of a public monument or a funerary urn, whose bodies reveal a juxtaposition of cut and polished stones arranged in wide or thickened layers. A feeling of angst may initially wash over you upon coming face-to-face with these sculptures partly owing to their mighty scale and partly to do with the almost risky balancing act of how they were composed. Unlike the loose stacking of stones common with cairns, Porcaro’s sculptures are firmly held together by an interior mechanism which ensures the entire work stands perfectly erect.

This cannot be said of just any sculptor, but for Porcaro, he most certainly is the type whose work could be described as exhibiting architectural features. The most overt association one can make with the larger works from Lost Stories is that of freestanding columns or pillars like Trajan’s Column from Roman Antiquity or Egyptian obelisks from one of the many pharaonic dynasties. While these are valid points, I think there is an even earlier suggestion that can be ascertained in Lost Stories as these have much in common with Prehistoric megalithic structures such as the dolmens and menhirs of Neolithic Europe. 

Don Porcaro, Lost Stories 7, 2025, marble, travertine, and granite. 55 1/2 x 18 x 18 inches / 141 x 45.7 x 45.7 cm. © Westwood Gallery NYC / Artwork © Don Porcaro

Though much of Antiquity is still enshrouded in mystery, there is an extensive written history coupled with corroborating evidence of what life was like during that era and how objects & architectural sites were meant to function. Prehistory, on the other hand, is denoted as the time before there was any form of written communication. Visuals alone - to a degree - are all that is left in reconstructing what those histories may have been. Porcaro’s Lost Stories almost speak to a real or imagined past that extends far before the time of writing and that these tall sculptures are all that is left of a civilization which ceases to exist. These sculptures may be allusory of everything from divine monuments to astrological guideposts.

Don Porcaro, Lost Stories 6, 2025, marble, slate, and limsestone. 32 x 18 x 18 inches / 81.3 x 45.7 x 45.7 cm. © Westwood Gallery NYC / Artwork © Don Porcaro

Comparatively smaller works from this series that were situated along metallic tables designed by Porcaro possibly gave more clues, so to speak, in that their forms were readily synonymous with the recognizable shapes of funereal urns or storage containers. The structural symmetry and curving exteriors project more of what you would associate with an amphora (ancient jar) from Classical Greece or a vessel excavated from a long-buried Etruscan tomb. 

Installation view of Don Porcaro: Lost Stories at Westwood Gallery, The Bowery. © Westwood Gallery NYC / Artwork © Don Porcaro

Art or Fact was an excellent partner series to exhibit in tandem with Lost Stories for these same questions are raised on a more intimate scale. Several of the gallery’s walls were allocated for Porcaro’s Art or Fact sculptures in which he also devised custom metallic shelves that project outwards whilst casting diagonal shadows beneath. Their presentation felt like the type of curatorial pedagogy employed when works of material culture are exhibited in an anthropological or archaeological context in art or natural history museums; think of the Ancient Egyptian displays at The Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Hall of Peoples wings at The American Museum of Natural History!

Don Porcaro, Art or Fact 76, 2025, stone, metal, paint. 9 x 4 x 4 inches / 22.9 x 10.2 x 10.2 cm. © Westwood Gallery NYC / Artwork © Don Porcaro

These eccentric objects possess a mixture of whimsy and utilitarianism with their playfully twirling bodies and portable practicality. A few of these objects resembled children’s toys like tops or baubles while others could pass for incense burners, candlesticks, or holders for writing instruments, among other examples. Where Lost Stories felt like it carried the weight of history, the Art or Fact series struck me as a more future-oriented vision. 

The shocks of colors - cyan blue, fiery orange, intense cherise, etc.  - suggest something beyond our wildest imaginations towards a distant future - the exact opposite of what the Lost Stories conveyed - or even something completely out of this world.

Don Porcaro, Art or Fact 13, 2025, stone, metal, paint. 5 x 3 x 3 inches / 12.7 x 7.6 x 7.6 cm. © Westwood Gallery NYC / Artwork © Don Porcaro

Stones are the natural records of the Earth’s history. As it has been for time immemorial, those same materials were reappropriated to fulfill myriad ends, which gave both new life and new meaning for the stones in the making of objects and structures. Porcaro’s stones - which hail everywhere from the quarries of Carrara, Italy to the rural mountains of Vermont - are fragments of the world that are pieced together to express a new kind of story or, more appropriately, spark the imaginations of those who find themselves in the presence of sculptures that simultaneously feel familiar and peculiar. It is just as if Porcaro’s sculptures were salvaged remnants discovered by archaeologists excavating a Prehistoric or Ancient land that was hidden away for much of history that then ignited a flurry of questions, the “Who?” “What?” “Where?” “Why?” and “How?” of historical inquiry. 

Studio Visit Reflections

Whenever the opportunity arises, I love to go the extra mile with savoring the full extent of a great exhibition by fitting in either an exhibition walkthrough or a studio visit with the artist(s) in question. Thanks to Westwood’s co-founder Margarite Almeida, she was able to facilitate a meeting with me and Porcaro at his Hell’s Kitchen studio where he has worked since 1976. Almeida, who joined me, recorded extensive footage and photographed key moments from my conversation with Porcaro (which lasted over two hours). Segments of my interview will be published in an accompanying post on social media. Here, I will share the highlights of our conversation.

View of Don Porcaro's studio and his sculptures. © Westwood Gallery NYC / Artwork © Don Porcaro

As one of the more spacious studios I have visited, a freight elevator led me and Almeida up to the sunlit and spatially expansive studio in which Porcaro has worked since graduating with an MFA in Sculpture from Columbia University. There was a brief mention of how the immediate neighborhood was noticeably different in 1970s & 1980s New York, “Sounds like something out of a Jane Dickson painting”, was my responding quip.

The first room, the primary workspace, was filled with unused stone slabs, partially worked sculptures, near-complete works, and many industrial-grade tools only to be held by those with more-than-fine motor skills. 

Don Porcaro and I engrossed in conversation while sitting on sculptural chairs that he designed. © Westwood Gallery NYC / Artwork © Don Porcaro

With every studio visit, I ask the question of from whence the artist first detected that initial jolt of creative impulse compelling them to devote their life to making. Porcaro chuckled and gave a wavy motion with his hands in explaining the many directions he went before settling on sculpture. He started off as an undergrad music major before switching to a theater major where the first instance in which he worked with his hands was to build stage set designs - “A set was a big sculpture”, as Porcaro put it. There were also the creative odd jobs of being an event photographer at a couple of colleges in New Jersey, which is where he grew up. Returning to sculpture, that comfortability with three-dimensional objects of strenuous physicality must have run in his DNA, for Porcaro’s father was a welder. 

While a graduate student at Columbia, Porcaro studied under the tutelage of Ronald Bladen (Canadian-born American, 1918 - 1988), a painter and sculptor, with the latter medium being executed in large-scale, site-specific installations. Just like his mentor and friend, Porcaro’s works also utilized the monumentality of scale and weighty materiality to probe how people and objects interact with space. 

View of Don Porcaro's studio and his sculptures. © Westwood Gallery NYC / Artwork © Don Porcaro

Not long after he acquired his MFA, Porcaro joined the faculty of Parsons School of Design where he wound up teaching for over four decades and eventually ascended to the role of the Chair of the Department of Fine Arts. Being an artist, an educator, and a department head is a very specific circumstance for artists with a penchant for teaching that otherwise may not be the case for those who are solely focused on their creative practice because there is a fine line between teaching others and remaining in-tune with your art. Porcaro, as you surmise by now, successfully came out on top. Momentarily, you will uncover more details about the legacy of his instruction upon other artists. 

Porcaro explaining the technical processes involved in the sanding and polishing of stones via one of his current works-in-progress. © Westwood Gallery NYC / Artwork © Don Porcaro

Porcaro’s stones originate from all over the world, and thus, we spent considerable time discussing how his travels informed his work. For Lost Stories, this series was directly influenced by a recent trip he took to Egypt where he was enamored with the structural longevity of its Ancient architecture held up by stones that were also physically manipulated to recall plants indigenous to the Nile - an age-old example of stone’s application toward constructed meaning. Beyond this series, Porcaro spent time in the extant ballcourts of the Mayan complexes, the citadel of Sacsayhuamán in Cusco, Peru, and along the prehistoric land effigy of the Serpent Mound in Ohio. 

For all of the architectural associations made with Porcaro’s sculptures, he told me about the anthropomorphism that is embedded in their formal presentations. For the freestanding works, abstracted feet that poke out from the bases suddenly redefine the sculpture as being more organic than inorganic in subject matter, similar to what is expressed in Prehistoric figurative artifacts like the pared-down anatomical features of the Venus of Willendorf or how Early Modern artists like Constantin Brâncuși engaged with the figure through much-reduced physiognomy. 

Don Porcaro, Data & Dust 4, 1996, limestone, slate, and metal. Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton Township, New Jersey. 132 x 84 x 90 inches. Image courtesy of Don Porcaro's website. 

Don Porcaro, All of Us installation, 2019. Commissioned by New Jersey Transit Lite Rail. Image courtesy of Don Porcaro's website.  

Given the monumentality of Porcaro’s freestanding Lost Stories sculptures, it begged the question of whether he had ever been approached for public art commissions. He most certainly has, with works that include: the twisting, DNA-strand formation of All of Us (2019) for the New Jersey Transit Lite Rail; the fungal-shaped Eros (2011) in the City Center of Portoroz, Slovenia; the bulbous and cagy Data & Dust 4 (1996) located at Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey; and, the otherworldly tendrilled shoots of Childhood’s End & Nomad (2011) at Kouros Sculpture Park in Ridgefield, Connecticut. 

Preoccupation with material culture as records of history has been a constant in Porcaro’s work, not only as musings on the past, but also of the present. In 2012, Porcaro unveiled The World is Full, a circular arrangement of 700 vessels that were individually painted in practically every shade of the rainbow as a metaphor for the world reaching a population of 7 billion people that year. These concrete and metal painted works were clustered in the middle of the Kumble Gallery at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus. Questions and concerns on overpopulation, mass migration, and spread of disease lay at the heart of this project. His site-specific inundation of sculptures as metaphor for overpopulation could be situated in excellent dialogue with any of the British sculptor Antony Gormley’s room-consuming spatial interventions!

Don Porcaro, Installation view of The World is Full, 2012, concrete, paint, and metal, 144 inches circle. Kumble Gallery, Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus. Image courtesy of NAD NOW - The Journal of the National Academy of Design. 

Porcaro’s wife, Leslie Wayne, who also is an artist and has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since the early-1990s, eventually arrived as she shares part of the space for her painting studio. She gladly joined our conversation and shared further insights about Porcaro’s sculptures, which made it all the more remarkable to hear how Wayne - as spouse and artist - interpreted her husband’s work. She, too, was also in a show at the same time as Porcaro as she exhibited work in Hollis Taggart Gallery’s recent Drop, Cloth exhibition. 

Porcaro, much like his columnar sculptures, is a pillar in his own right in the artistic community. The universality of Porcaro’s positive reputation among artists not only stems from his open support of fellow creatives, but most especially in the legacies of his 40+ year career as an arts educator at Parsons School of Design. When I posted a few photos to Instagram that briefly summarized my wonderful visit with him, I was astounded by the comments I received:

- “He was my painting teacher at Parsons!"

- “Don Porcaro!!! He was my wonderful Sculpture Professor at Parsons School of Design!”

- “HI DON! Looking forward to seeing your show today!”

And then there were numerous other private messages I received that further revealed the incredibly inspiring reach Porcaro exerted to many generations of students who not only specialize in sculpture, but even those of two-dimensional mediums like painting and printmaking. As one of Parsons’s veteran instructors, he taught there from 1975 to 2017 and nearly a decade since retirement, the man is still fondly remembered by former students as Professor Porcaro. I am not a former student of Porcaro’s, but as a staunch advocate for teachers, I have a discerning eye for quality educators and can resolutely affirm Porcaro fits the bill. 

Me, Margarite Almeida, and Don Porcaro posing our legs in the same manner as Porcaro's twisting sculptures. Image courtesy of Liam Otero. 

Had I not been booked with other appointments for the remainder of my day, Porcaro is exactly the kind of artist with whom I would have been more than happy to converse for many more hours (and Leslie Wayne, too, in the short time we spoke). Nevertheless, Porcaro’s life as a sculptor has been one of adventure, both literally in his globetrotting travels across 5 continents and figuratively in the directions his work has taken. Change is a given for any artist, but there is something comforting about one who, though continuously evolving, retains semblances of their earlier projects. Porcaro’s stacked sculptures and fun-colored, thingamajig objects perpetually invite new questions, ideas, and perspectives into their functionality and meanings. His is the sort of work where you can inquisitively eye them as either art or artifact (or, Art or Fact). WM

Don Porcaro: Lost Stories at Westwood Gallery, The Bowery (November 6 - December 27, 2025)

Exhibition Link