Sonnet I · Bronze · Featured in Ars Poetica, April 2026
Lorri Acott makes figurative sculpture from a studio in the mountains of Colorado. Her figures are elongated — long legs, outstretched arms, no faces, no clothing — abstracted past portraiture into pure gesture. The frequent comparison is to Giacometti, and the formal kinship is real, but the emotional register is different: where Giacometti was reaching toward distance, Acott is reaching toward connection.
The process is paperclay first, then bronze. She works the figures in fired ceramic, then makes the molds and casts them. The fire-cracks from the kiln stay visible in the bronze — a record of the moment the work was made, kept rather than polished out. The surface remembers how the piece came to be.
Her largest works carry the same visual language at monumental scale. A 22-foot Spirit of Renewal stands at the Coffelt-Lamoreaux community in Phoenix — installed for a public housing project as part of a community renewal effort. An 11-foot Conversation with Myself is at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery. Peace, in Greeley, was named by the Michigan ACLU as art to change the world.
Public installations in ten states, magazine features in Southwest Art and Sculptural Pursuit, collectors in the Netherlands, South Africa, and Japan — but the through-line of the work is smaller than that. Each piece is a moment of human gesture in space, made to be encountered by one person at a time. The meaning is not declared; it is felt by whoever happens to walk by.
Lorri originated the small-scale charitable initiative that became Gives™ alongside her husband and longtime collaborator Adam Schultz. Together as Dream Big Sculpture, they have placed monumental public art for over twenty-five years — the same practice of putting work where it serves now expanded into a charitable transfer program.
Visit Gives™ →Lorri's work is shown across both Bainbridge and Park City. Browse the full collection — medium, dimensions, and price visible on every piece.
