CDM Alum Creates Large-scale Sculpture that Marries Art and Science

When Jonathan Prince, ‘80 was 12, his father, Ivin Prince, ’48, brought him along on a visit to the studio of a patient, Jacques Lipschitz, the noted cubist sculptor. Prince says that the two connected on that visit and that, later, Lipschitz offered to let him apprentice in the studio. “I would go up there as often as I could get my parents to take me,” Prince says. “And I set up a studio in our basement.”

“Since I was 12 years old, I’ve been in love with sculpture,” Prince says.

Despite his early and, it turns out, lifelong love of art, and, particularly, of sculpture, Prince’s professional trajectory was anything but direct. Before he found his way back to the studio, he followed his father to Columbia University College of Dental Medicine and earned a certificate in prosthodontics from the University of Southern California School of Dentistry. “I think that I wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do,” Prince says.

But, Prince says, it was not a coincidence that he just naturally gravitated toward the specialty that was the most sculptural. While he was still practicing, he also became a sought-after illustrator for dental textbooks.

After practicing for two years Prince says that he knew he wanted to work in a more creative field but was reluctant to commit to a life as a fine artist. “Because that’s an impossible way to make a living,” he laughs.

“So I actually went into the movie business and became a film producer,” he says. Prince landed a production deal with Columbia Pictures and produced The Plague, based on Albert Camus’ play and starring William Hurt. “Not exactly your uplifting movie,” Prince says. “You know, it's a nihilistic nightmare.”

But film production did not satisfy the creative hunger that Prince was experiencing. “I realized that being a producer was great until you hire your director, then you’re not very creative anymore.”

So Prince launched his third career. “I love science,” he says. “After going through dental school, I wanted to do something more scientific. I got involved in special effects and computer animation.” 

Prince says that in 1999, his company created sets for a five-part television miniseries called People of the Century, which was hosted by Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, and Leslie Stahl. "They're all on blue screen. And I did all the sets in computer, so it was early augmented reality. Actually, the earliest example of it, and it was all being run with these giant graphics computers.” The program won an Emmy for set design.

Prince pivoted again, combining his background in the sciences with holographic display research that was being done by his special effects company.  DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military, engaged him as the principal investigator and project manager for a remote surgical simulation machine. “You could have a doctor from Walter Reed operating remotely on somebody anywhere around the world,” he says.

In the late 1990s, Prince launched a company that was developing a streaming media platform.

Finally, in 2004, Prince decided to pursue the passion that was ignited in Lipschitz’s studio so many years earlier. He says that experience and age made it the right time to take a leap of faith. “I'm willing to take the risk of putting everything that I am into the work,” he says. “I think it's rare that you find a young artist who's able to really do that because they're not

bringing that much of their life to it. And they're usually too self-conscious to really show their life completely. That’s the beauty of doing what I'm doing at the age I'm at and growing into and having done all these things before. I'm really not afraid to put myself out there and I really feel that everything I've done shapes the work.”

Over the past two decades, Prince has become a celebrated sculptor whose large-scale pieces grace many high-profile public spaces, including Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, outside of the United Nations, and the Sculpture Garden at 590 Madison Avenue in New York City. He lives and works in the Berkshire House, a sprawling 23,000 square foot, 100-year-old renovated barn, and is currently in the process of creating a series of home furnishings that blur the line between furniture and art.

Prince is still very interested in the intersection of art and science. “We've got an astrophysicist coming here who sought us out,” Prince says. “He saw one of my pieces and contacted us to say, ‘Oh my God! Your work looks like folded dark matter. Can we do a project together?’”

“I think of my life as a stool with three legs: love, open heartedness, and creativity,” Prince says. “And that's what drives me. It drives the practice. It drives the work. It drives my life. And that's the way I try to live.”