Sculptor Janice Corkin Rudolf in her Concord, Mass., studio. “I love the feel of the clay. It helps my subconscious flow. But I love the sculpture in bronze. It’s a beautiful medium.”

Visual Arts

Alum Sculptor Captures “Inner Essence”

Janice Corkin Rudolf (CFA’74) has depicted Thoreau, Alcott—and Franklin Park Zoo’s Kiki the gorilla

Sculptor Janice Corkin Rudolf moved to Concord, Mass., just three years ago, but her house holds a lifetime’s worth of art, a gloriously eclectic collection of sculptures and pictures and objects, with a Beethoven portrait here, a Ruth Bader Ginsburg portrait over there, and a piano where she can play jazz when the mood strikes. But her pride and joy is upstairs in her studio, where her clay sculptures of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Tubman are in progress.

“It’s what I find fulfilling—to try to make a person or an animal and capture their inner essence,” says Rudolf (CFA’74). “It’s good when you have this inner vision of people that you can see beyond the surface.”

It’s summer, and she’s finishing up a sort of Massachusetts history triptych, adding Hawthorne to previous sculptures of transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau, on display at the Pingree School in Hamilton, and Louisa May Alcott, shown at the Copley Society of Art gallery on Newbury Street in 2025. Ralph Waldo Emerson may be next.

“I’ve always loved Thoreau as a writer. I never thought I would move to Thoreau Street,” she says. “Here in Concord, every week there’s something about the Thoreaus, or mentioning Alcott, or mentioning Emerson. Whether it’s some kind of library program or a walk that you’re going on, they’re just so much a part of everyday life, and they deserve more sculpture.

“I don’t want to see more war sculptures. I want to see people who have accomplished something,” she says.

Rudolf’s art is permanently installed in several locations around Greater Boston, including Boston Children’s Hospital, Emmanuel College, and the public library in Sudbury, where she lived and taught before opening her Thoreau Street Art Studios in Concord. In summer 2025, her Vinyasa stood on the grounds of The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox.

One piece that’s unlikely to move is at the Franklin Park Zoo: her 1,600-pound, bigger-than-life-size bronze of resident gorilla Kiki and her daughter Kimani. “I sat and watched them for hours,” Rudolf says. “They’re such cool animals to be that close to. They look like they have a soul when you really look at them.” She recently traveled to Uganda with her husband and a group from the zoo to see gorillas in the wild.

All her works are representational. She tried abstract, but “once I learned to sculpt the figure at BU, I became fascinated with it.”

Her interest in sculpture began when her family moved from Hull to Brookline. As a third grader, she walked across the street by herself to meet their new neighbor, sculptor Peter Abate. He was friendly and welcoming and handed her some of his clay to experiment with. It has been a passion of hers pretty much ever since.

She sculpts in clay, using both her hands and tools, and the finished work is then cast in bronze at Sincere Metal Works foundry in Amesbury.

“I love the feel of the clay,” Rudolf says. “It helps my subconscious flow. But I love the sculpture in bronze. It’s a beautiful medium.”

She took painting and drawing classes on the side through her school years, including Saturdays at the Museum of Fine Arts, and received a fine arts degree from Colorado Women’s College. But her parents were not pleased with her decision to become a full-time artist, and she came to BU ostensibly to get a teaching degree. Before long, though, she heard the siren song of the clay again and switched majors to sculpture, without telling her parents until the very end. 

“They were very supportive of my artwork,” Rudolf says. “They were just worried about me making a living.”

To settle the issue, she earned a degree in teaching art from Antioch College and in 1974 took a job with the Boston Public Schools—just in time for the school busing crisis—teaching art at three different schools each week, 700 kids. “That was wonderful, actually, because the children just loved me,” Rudolf says. “It must have been a little oasis in the day for them, too, given the times.” 

Through her family’s Robert Lloyd Corkin Charitable Foundation, in memory of her late brother, she has created a $1 million scholarship fund for undergraduates at BU’s College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts, with spending matched by the University under the Century Challenge program. The foundation has also provided $100,000 to support high school students to attend CFA’s Visual Arts Summer Institute. 

“During my time at Boston Public Schools, there were talented kids who didn’t have money to take art or go to art school. I feel very strongly that there’s a lot of talent that isn’t tapped because they can’t afford to pay, and we should do something,” she says.

She continues teaching young people, and lives like one too, giving swimming lessons and taking a daily half-mile swim herself; this past summer, she swam the aquatic leg of a triathlon, with her son and son-in-law taking the other two parts. She has 4 children—2 of whom, John Rudolf (MET’09) and David Rudolf (ENG’21), are alums—and 10 grandchildren. Her husband, John Bogert Emery, is a violinist with the Worcester Symphony Orchestra and teaches violin at Rivers School Conservatory in Weston.

Beyond her family, her artwork remains close to her heart. 

“Sculpture has a real human quality,” she says. “Sometimes it seems like I’m waiting for my sculptures to talk back to me.”