Patricia Lay has received two grants in sculpture from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a grant from the American Scandinavian Foundation. She has been awarded four public art commissions including the installation of a large-scale site-specific sculpture in the sculpture park at the Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo, Norway. She has had solo exhibitions at Condeso/Lawler Gallery, NYC; Jersey City Museum; New Jersey State Museum; and Douglass College, Rutgers University. Her work has been included in group exhibitions in Korea, China, Norway and Slovakia and at the Jersey City Museum, Newark Museum, New Jersey State Museum, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Montclair Art Museum, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Everson Museum, and the 1975 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Lay's work is featured in a number of books including Lives and Works, Talks With Women Artists, Volume II by J. Arbeiter, B. Smith, S. Swenson; Working in Clay and The Craft and Art of Clay both by Susan Peterson and Overseas Contemporary Ceramic Art Classics, by Bai Ming, Jiangxi Fine Arts Publishing House, China. Her work is included in the collections of IBM, New Jersey State Museum, Rutgers University, Montclair State University and in numerous private collections. A graduate of Pratt Institute and Rochester Institute of Technology, Lay is a Professor of Art at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

Patricia Lay's Altar Heads are androgynous, multi-racial, hybrid, cyborg-like representations that personify the conflict between technology and the human spirit. They also refer to the idealized portraits from many cultures including the altar heads of the Ife and Benin Kingdoms in Nigeria, the gods and goddesses of Greek Classical sculpture, Buddha and the Hindu deities. However, while these heads may have the demeanor of objects of worship, they are more accurately seen and experienced as metaphors of the human experience in the 21st Century.