Merritt Schnipper is a lawyer and sculptor living outside of Brattleboro, VT. He began his artistic training as a studio assistant to Provincetown, MA sculptor Jack Kearney, for whom he worked primarily as a welder and fabricator during the mid-1990s.  Merritt then went on to study foundry processes and advanced welding and fabrication technique at the Massachusetts College of Art, where he had the opportunity to learn from sculptors including George Greenameyer, David Phillips, and Reid Drum.  After a time working as a fabricator in the Santa Fe, NM studio of sculptor Bill Barrett, Merritt returned to Cape Cod to co-found a small bronze foundry, where he and his partner cast their own work as well as the work of sculptors such as Joyce Johnson, Richard Pepitone, and Romolo Del Deo.

After moving to Vermont in 2003, Merritt shifted the focus of his own work from bronze casting to steel fabrication, converting a former goat barn on his property into a fabrication shop and moving into the world of large-scale outdoor work. During this time Merritt also worked for renowned abstract expressionist Jules Olitski, helping to rehabilitate many of that artist's steel sculptures from the 1970s and 1980s. Merritt presently works primarily--though not exclusively--in steel, dividing his efforts between larger, outdoor pieces crafted from sheet steel and smaller indoor assemblages crafted from a mixture of bar stock, sheet, and found objects.

back to Merritt Schnipper's gallery