Boor Sculpture Studio Celebrating 20 Years

Composite image shows the Boor Sculpture studio above, and three students working in it below: a woman creating a clay sculpture of a person, a man cutting PVC pipe with a circular saw, and a person in a welding helmet working with on a triangular piece of metal as sparks fly.

The 20,000-square-foot Boor Sculpture Studio has ample room and equipment for a wide variety of 3-dimensional creations.

ALBANY, N.Y. (March 22, 2022) — Terri Boor’s husband persuaded her to make him a promise: She was to continue pursuing her love of the arts even after his death. When he passed away in 1978, she kept that loving promise and, in the process, transformed the University at Albany.

In the years after her husband’s death, Boor — already an artist in her own right — signed up for an art class at UAlbany. Energized by faculty artists, including sculptors Edward Mayer and Roger Bisbing, and embraced by a diverse community of fellow student artists, Boor found an extended family and a renewed motivation to further her artistic endeavors. It also led her to make a generous gift to the art sculpture studio that, today, bears her name.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Boor Sculpture Studio, a gleaming one-story, 20,000-square-foot building with an in-ground furnace for casting, a figure modeling room and a digital media suite. The entire building, which includes an experimental gallery/installation area, is dedicated to encouraging students and faculty to explore and create three-dimensional art.

"The Boor Sculpture Studio, designed in consultation with some of the very faculty and artists who would occupy it, is an incredibly flexible, safe and inspiring production facility,” said Daniel Goodwin, professor and studio art director who works in the Boor. “Unique in the region, it continues to support the ever-evolving demands of undergraduate, graduate and faculty artists who are able to realize work here that quite literally can’t happen anywhere else."

“The Boor provides us with an amazing abundance of traditional fabrication facilities,” said Gracelee Lawrence, assistant visiting professor of sculpture. She noted that planned enhancements will empower students to “imagine a wider breadth of possibilities that will undoubtedly facilitate greater work, merging the future and the past.”

For Boor — who died in 2020 — supporting the University was important “because, through its professors and its curricula, the University takes an exceptional interest in the student body. Albany has such a fine faculty and staff. I know many of them on a personal basis, and they’re just terrific. They’re the best,” she said in a 2002 interview with UAlbany Magazine.

Terri Boor sits surrounded by sculptures — Terri Boor

For many of those same faculty members, the admiration was — and continues to be — mutual. “Terri was a unique force and a warm and generous individual who has left her mark on the campus and on the people who knew and worked with her,” said Ed Mayer, the now-retired professor who mentored and befriended Boor more than three decades ago.

In addition to the major naming gift in 2002, Boor donated numerous personal works of sculpture to the University, many of which are on display throughout the campuses. Boor’s artwork, however, is not the only way her presence is still felt at the University: She endowed a sculpture fellowship; created the Terry Cosma Boor Sculpture Prize; and has underwritten a visiting sculptor fund.

With her passing in 2020, Terri Boor bequeathed a generous gift to ensure that a passion and love of pursuing the arts lives on at UAlbany, inspiring the next generation of artists.

The original version of this story, written by Paul Miller ’21, was published in the Spring edition of UAlbany Magazine, which is dedicated to the fine arts.