Shirley Wagner is a Tucson-based sculptor whose work emerges from geometry and structure, shaping form within the built environment. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Youngstown State University in Ohio, where her early interest in form and material laid the foundation for a practice that has evolved over more than three decades.

Her early work took form as layered wooden sculptures for the wall, informed by aerial mapping and the natural forms of the desert Southwest. These works read almost as constructed terrains—grids, elevations, and shifting planes—where light and shadow activate the surface like changing conditions across a landscape. This period established a foundational language rooted in structure, spatial rhythm, and the logic of construction.

In recent years, she expanded her material language into metal, moving into large-scale, self-standing figurative sculpture for public art. These works retain an architectural sensibility—built through planes, balance, and internal framework—while introducing a more expressive human presence. The figures engage space much like structures themselves, creating moments of tension, lift, and openness within the landscape. In 2022, she was awarded grants from Scottsdale Public Art, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and Arizona Women for the Arts, helping to propel her work into the public realm.

Her current work marks a return to the wall, now approached through metal. By embedding sculptural forms directly into architectural surfaces, Wagner creates work that becomes inseparable from its setting—less an object placed on a wall and more an intervention within it. Edges fold into structure, forms emerge from within, and the boundary between sculpture and architecture dissolves. This direction reflects a continued interest in how constructed form can shape emotional and spatial experience.

Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Tucson Museum of Art, the University of Arizona Honors College, El Rio Health System of Care, and the Tucson Medical Center. Wagner has been nominated for the Governor’s Arts Award and is represented by Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery.