Beatrice Schleyer: Reclaiming Wreckage, Reframing Modernism

Medici Circle Scholar Beatrice Schleyer and Her Trip to The Chinati Foundation

By Gamy Cortes

For Department of Art student Beatrice Schleyer, M.F.A '27, making art with auto parts that have been involved in collisions, entails having an awareness of their provenance. 

“I'm interested in addressing infrastructural issues with transportation that put both our bodies and the environment in danger,” said Schleyer. 

Funding Artistic Research

Founded in 2004, the Medici Circle Scholarship supports academic growth and broadens the creative development of its recipients by awarding funding to each Medici Scholar for their specific projects. This unique scholarship program takes education beyond the classroom, allowing scholars to reach their creative and professional goals. Through this scholarship, Schleyer was able to visit a large collection of John Chamberlain's sculptures and access some of his exclusive biographical details at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. 

Being able to see Chamberlain’s work up close and in person allowed Schleyer to research his specific material strategies. She notes, for instance, that Chamberlain’s sculptures often balance large clusters of metal on tiny points. This sense of precariousness and weightlessness, Schleyer believes, carries the formal power to draw viewers in. 

But for Schleyer, the question then becomes: what do you do once you have a viewer's attention? 

Her mentor at UC Irvine, Professor Amanda Ross-Ho, helped her process these reflections during the Medici application process. Schleyer’s patron, Sheila Peterson, offered her support as well — including, Schleyer said, a small gift she now keeps pinned to her bulletin board: a magazine clipping of an installation featuring rearview mirrors and other car parts. 

“Getting the work to speak for itself in terms of its message is an ineffable achievement,” said Schleyer. “But contemporary artists, as opposed to modernists like Chamberlain, are less likely to get away with creating art that doesn’t have a broader conceptual framework.” 

Image: Beatrice Schleyer posing with a John Chamberlain sculpture at The Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

Growing Up in the Underground 

Schleyer’s relationship to metal — and to the traditionally “macho” skills needed for her artistic work — was hard-earned long before she ever welded a sculpture. 

Growing up in New York City, Schleyer immersed herself in subcultures that sat outside the white-walled gallery world. As a teenager, she was absorbed by the club scene and drawn to underground cinema. She recalls discovering Shinya Tsukamoto’s film Tetsuo: The Iron Man — an industrial fever dream where a regular salaryman mutates into a mechanical monster. Eventually, physically embodying those aesthetics as a club kid became too cumbersome for Schleyer. 
 
In what would have been her junior year, Schleyer left high school and entered technical school, earning her GED and a foundation in welding. But the union track, she realized, wasn’t for her. She moved on to get a BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts, but had trouble finding a path in the medium after graduation. 
 
A few years later, the death of her father inspired her to study Butoh and somatic movement, which acted as a way of processing her grief. Her studies culminated in a performance practice; even then, her technical instincts kept resurfacing, echoing Tsukamoto’s depiction of the machine as an inevitability. 
 
In 2016, she sold her childhood home and used her portion of the proceeds to purchase a former auto shop in Detroit. She began an apprenticeship with a local sculptor and metal fabricator, expanding on her skills from technical school. At first, she built objects that extended her body for performance. As she sorted through the building's material archive of dead-stock and defunct auto-electric parts, she began sculpting steel armatures in conversation with some of the pieces she found. 

Image: Beatrice Schleyer and Ash Arder's pieces from their joint exhibition, automota. Photo by Suzy Poling, Light-Arc Studio. 

“That whole experience made it clear to me that I wasn't going to escape this calling,” said Schleyer. 
 
This realization ultimately led her to UC Irvine to pursue her M.F.A., a place where she could both refine her studio practice and pursue her pedagogical goals. 

Re-sculpting a Modernist Inheritance 

During her visit to The Chinati Foundation, Schleyer was also able to stand before minimalist artist Donald Judd’s orthogonal aluminum sculptures, the beauty of which moved her to tears. However, being inside an institution built from military infrastructure — and dominated by male modernist players — also raised complicated questions about power, land use and the ethics of monumental artistic legacy. She admired parts of their practice, chiefly Chamberlain’s intuitive approach to working with metal, but the history surrounding the work often felt fraught. 
 
“There’s this incredible financial access that allowed them to take over a small town in Texas and turn it into an art compound and eventually a tourist destination,” said Schleyer. “My head was spinning with all these different philosophical and ethical concerns about how space is used.” 

Sculpture, for Schleyer, should be concerned with the material’s provenance. Chamberlain thought of collision-damaged car parts purely in formal terms, while for Schleyer, the simultaneously beneficial and destructive relationship between humans and automobiles is important to consider.
 
“I try to be responsive to the characteristics of the material, such as existing mounting holes,” said Schleyer. “I also address its source in the discussion and titles of the works.”  

While Chamberlain’s philosophy of material only considers its relevance to the artist’s will in shaping it, Schleyer is sensitive to the physical and emotional trauma of the people affected by accidents.
 
“As contemporary artists, I believe we are encouraged to make work that speaks to larger issues,” said Schleyer, “and as a woman who was socialized to be emotionally attuned to the people and situations around me, I also bring an ethos of care to the subject matter.” 

What’s Next? 

Schleyer is currently preparing for her group show in UCI’s University Art Gallery and Room Gallery, which will feature the work of six second-year M.F.A. students. The public reception will take place on Feb. 7, 2026, from 2 to 5 p.m.

To learn more about Beatrice Schleyer's work, visit their website at jujumechanics.com. To learn more about the Medici Circle and ways to support or apply, visit here.