Judith Shea is an American artist, born in Philadelphia. She was raised on Long Island, and has lived and worked in New York City ever since.  Her studies of the human figure in many guises and materials were first exhibited in 1976 at The Clocktower in Lower Manhattan, in a performative ‘clothing’ work. In 1981 she began making 3D bronze and cast iron 'hollow' figures, followed in the 1990s by carved wooden statues and 'anti-monuments'.

In 2012 Shea received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Art, The Artist's Legacy Award and Anonymous Was A Woman in 2011, The Rome Prize 1994, the Fellowship of The Saint-Gaudens Memorial 1993, and two National Endowment for the Arts Awards in Sculpture in 1984 and 1986.

Her sculptures have been exhibited in the White House Rose Garden in 1995 and 1997, at The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and are on permanent view in the Hirshhorn Museum's Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. ("Post-Balzac" 1990); the Walker Art Center's Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis ("Without Words 1988) ; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City ("Storage 1999"); and at the U.S. Embassy in Istanbul, Turkey (Remnant 2003).

Installation of new work in the gardens is made possible in part through the Joyce and Irving Goldman Foundation, The Johnson Family Foundation, the Cowles Charitable Trust, Wendy and Les Mandelbaum, Anonymous Donor, Sandy and Steve Perlbinder, and LHR member support.

Art in the Gardens is funded in part by Suffolk County.