Sharon Hecker (BA cum laude Renaissance Studies, Yale University, MA History of Art 1994, Ph.D. 1999), specializes in modern and contemporary Italian Art. A leading expert on Medardo Rosso, she has authored over 20 publications on the artist, including A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture (UC Press, 2017), awarded CAA’s Millard Meiss Prize and recently published in Italian.
Sharon has curated numerous exhibitions on Rosso, including Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions (Harvard University Art Museums, 2004), the retrospective Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form (Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2017) and, with Julia Peyton-Jones, Medardo Rosso: Sight Unseen and His Encounters with London (Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 2018).
For her work on Rosso, Sharon has received fellowships from the Getty, Fulbright and Mellon Foundations.
She also writes about key twentieth century Italian artists such as Lucio Fontana and Luciano Fabro, and is co-author of Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’ (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
Hecker published “An Italian Sculptor-Emigré in Paris: The Case of Medardo Rosso” in “Sculpting Abroad Nationality and Mobility of Sculptors in the Nineteenth Century” (2020); “The Modern Italian Sculptor as International Entrepreneur: The Case of Medardo Rosso (1858–1928)” in “The Internationalisation of the Art Market in the Age of Nation States, 1750-1914”. Hecker edited “Finding Lost Wax: The Disappearance and Recovery of an Ancient Casting Technique and the Experiments of Medardo Rosso” (Brill Studies in Art and Materiality Series, 2020) and “Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art” (Bloomsbury, 2020). She teaches at Cooper Union and is curating an exhibition on Lucio Fontana’s ceramics at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2024).
Sharon writes about cultural heritage, authenticity, and attribution as related to the art market and art law. She recently trademarked a best practices approach to conducting due diligence on art objects called The Hecker Standard ™.
