Anne Arnold began making sculptures in the mid-1950s, when Abstract Expressionism still had a strong hold on the American art scene. Her works depicting animals and people are made from a diverse array of materials, such as bronze, clay, wood, and fabric soaked in resin. Autobiographical references permeate many of Arnold’s sculptures, including her works featuring life-size, or larger, domestic animals. Charlie, a black-and-white cat, and Charlotte, a pudgy pig, are an unlikely, yet compatible, duo—humorous and most certainly unexpected. Arnold intuitively captured the quirky nature of her subjects. Here, the stretched-out leanness of a cat, perhaps as it peeks its head over the sill of a window, and the seemingly majestic, but humble, presence of a pig represent characteristics we may recognize in one another.

Label from Menagerie: Animals on View, March 11–June 4, 2017