Works Exhibitions & Events Mentions Education Awards

Kris Pitzer

Sculpture, mixed media, fabrication, Philadelphia

I make art that speaks to contradiction—between beauty and waste, permanence and impermanence, reverence and ruin. My practice sits at the uncomfortable intersection of ecological anxiety, personal vulnerability, and the quiet rituals of making. Whether I’m working in glass, metal, or wood, my work is driven by an urgency to confront the systems we’re complicit in—and the ones we create inside ourselves.

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Works

(Excess) Baggage

Wood, 2025

This piece is personal, but not private. It speaks to the quiet burdens many carry, masked by polished veneers, hidden in plain sight. By constructing this as an heirloom object, I’m also interrogating what we pass on, what we normalize, and what we pretend doesn’t weigh us down. (Excess) Baggage invites viewers to laugh, then look closer. It is both a love letter to the tools that keep us afloat and a gentle critique of the systems that require so much intervention just to make a life feel “normal.”

Lachrymatory for Eternal Reinvestment

Wood, glass, 2025

As an artist working with glass, I’m caught in a cycle of reverence and reckoning. Glass is one of the few materials that can, in theory, be infinitely recycled—yet we rarely treat it that way. The infrastructure to properly recycle glass is fractured, inefficient, and often bypassed entirely. Meanwhile, we continue extracting sand and minerals to produce more “new” glass, feeding a system of waste masked as innovation. This piece mourns that system. The lachrymatory, historically used to collect tears, becomes here a monument to our failure to reinvest—not only our resources, but our care, our attention, our responsibility. The glass drop spilling from the spigot is not just a tear; it is a distillation of our misplaced priorities.

Nuances in Viridity

Steel, glass, 2025

Anthology of the Anthropocene, Vol. 1: Pious Subterfuge

Steel, glass, 2025

Pious Subterfuge is the first chapter in a larger exploration of human complicity in the age of the Anthropocene—a moment defined by overwhelming consumption, environmental denial, and the quiet violence of everyday choices.

Anthology of the Anthropocene, Vol. 2: Rendezvous de la Mer

Mixed media, 2025

In the United States, less than a third of glass is recycled, and even that figure hides deeper inefficiencies. The infrastructure to sort, clean, and remelt glass is expensive and regionally limited. The various colors and formulas of glass are incompatible with each other, and single- stream recycling programs lead to contamination which renders much of it unrecyclable. The promise of glass as a “green” alternative has been a kind of collective greenwashing: a convenient narrative that soothes consumer guilt while leaving the systemic failures of waste management unexamined. What is revealed in this work is not an endless cycle, but a broken one—a fragile material burdened by our myths of sustainability.

Anthology of the Anthropocene, Vol. 3: Ascension

Mixed media, 2025

Ascension is the final volume in a trilogy that confronts our collective surrender to convenience and consumption. The staircase rises through a manufactured landscape of single-use waste—45 cubic feet of plastic refuse I collected from six Tyler School of Art recycling bins during a three week period (proof of a system addicted to disposability)—leads not to transcendence, but to a quietly damning altar of reconciliation and admonishment.