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For Stephen Lichty, Sculpture Makes Visible What Matter Remembers

At YveYANG Gallery, the San Francisco-based artist turns Liberty Hill quartz, iron sand from Ocean Beach and gathered pine resin into a sculptural meditation on geology, extraction, labor and the limits of human intervention.

Among the more ambitious shows on the busy May art calendar in New York, “Ghost Stones,” by Kansas City-born, San Francisco-based artist Stephen Lichty, on view at YveYANG Gallery, particularly stood out. Lichty pursues a singular investigation into the sculptural medium, beginning with the material intelligence of nature itself and moving from there into the geological and human histories embedded within it. At the center of the show is what a press release describes as ongoing research into quartz and its implications in a history of expansionism and extraction linking back to the Gold Rush. Lichty’s practice might first be understood as a profoundly materialist approach to the geological and physical essence of the elements around us, which precede and often exceed what language can encapsulate or contain—an investigation of matter in space that is physical, sociological and philosophical at once.

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Lichty’s fascination with this specific material began more than a decade ago, when he encountered an enigmatic boulder while briefly employed as a stonemason’s assistant in the Bay Area. That genuine interest in understanding the composition of the material world still informs all his work and his relationship with his surroundings. He tracked the quartz boulder to its source, Liberty Hill Diggings, a defunct mine near the historic Gold Rush-era community of Dutch Flat, surrounded by the Tahoe National Forest in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. In the mid-1800s, small-scale panning operations in nearby rivers gave way to massive extraction through dynamite blasting and hydraulic mining. Before regulation, these practices caused environmental devastation, choking rivers with debris and toxic mercury, endangering agriculture and leaving behind a scarred landscape. The materials still tell this story in their composition and textures, which is why what appears to be a “simple” raw stone can become one of three presences anchoring the entire exhibition.

"Ghost Stone" Artist: Stephen Lichty Venue: YveYANG Gallery Address: 2 Wooster St, New York, New York Through: July 7, 2026

Notably, Lichty’s path to sculpture wove through media theory rather than a traditional fine arts education. While some of his peers moved in more experimental directions, he found himself drawn toward existing forms and sculptural tropes, often approached on a semiotic and philosophical level. “One of the pleasures of sculpture is that you can walk around the world and just enjoy relationships between things in the material world from a sculptural lens,” Lichty tells Observer. He resists describing the YveYANG show as........

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