Joel Shapiro hadn’t originally planned to be a sculptor—he hoped to become a doctor. But then he spent two years in India with the Peace Corps and realized he wanted to pursue art. Shapiro returned to New York and earned an M.A. from NYU in 1969. He began his practice with small cast works, but eventually found his calling in towering sculptures that hovered between abstraction and figuration. Some of his well-known public commissions are at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington D.C., and the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou, China. A survey of the artist’s five-decade career, on view in Tokyo, explores his pioneering efforts to push the boundaries of modern sculpture. —Paulina Prosnitz