Alum Sculptor Captures “Inner Essence”
Janice Corkin Rudolf (CFA’74) has depicted Thoreau, Alcott—and Franklin Park Zoo’s Kiki the gorilla
Alum Sculptor Captures “Inner Essence”
Janice Corkin Rudolf (CFA’74) has depicted Thoreau, Alcott—and Franklin Park Zoo’s Kiki the gorilla
This article was originally published in Bostonia on April 3, 2026. By Joel Brown. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi
EXCERPT
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.”
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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.
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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 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.
Sculpture has a real human quality. Sometimes it seems like I’m waiting for my sculptures to talk back to me.