Steven Siegel (born 1953) is an American artist whose work includes public art, installation art, sculpture, collage and film.Phillips, Patricia C. "Wandering Through Time: The Sculpture of Steven Siegel," Sculpture, October 2003, p. 32–7.Grande, John K. "We Are the Landscape: A Conversation with Steven Siegel," Sculpture, March 2010, p. 41–5.Woo, Jae-yeon. "Artist Steven Siegel inches toward becoming one with nature," Yonhap News Agency, November 23, 2016. Retrieved August 3, 2021. He is most known for site-specific, outdoor sculptures, public art commissions and installations made from repurposed pre- and postconsumer materials, which have been influenced by concepts and processes derived from geology and evolutionary biology.Scrupe, Mara Adamitz. "Environment, Audience, and Public Art in the New World (Order)," Sculpture, March 2000, p. 42–9.Perreault, John. "Steven Siegel: The Sculptor from Planet X," ArtsJournal, February 14, 2011. Retrieved August 3, 2021. Writers relate his work in formal terms to minimalism, in its materials and emphasis on hands-on processes to postminimalism, and in its unconventional means (natural sites, community involvement, and embrace of ephemerality) to Land art.Baucon, Andrea. "The Abyss of Time," Geology in Art, Tracemaker, 2009. Retrieved August 3, 2021.Weintraub, Linda. Cycle-Logical Art, Recycling Matters for Eco-Art , Rhinebeck, NY: Artnow Publications, 2006, p. 64–6. Retrieved August 4, 2021.Perreault, John. "Wonderful Life," Wonderful Life: Works by Steven Siegel, Boone, NC: Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, 2009. Retrieved August 5, 2021.
His studio work has been exhibited at Marlborough Fine Art,Baker, Allese Thomson. "Steven Siegel," Artforum, February 2011. Retrieved August 3, 2021. Montalvo Arts Center, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art,Zimmer, William. "On Paper, a Show That Measures Up," The New York Times, March 18, 2001, p. CN14. Retrieved August 4, 2021. and the Drawing Center, among other venues.Brown, Linda. "Steven Siegel," RSVP: Six Artists Respond, Charlotte, NC: Bechtler Gallery, 1992, p. 20–3. He has created commissioned works in cities and universities throughout the U.S. and Europe, in Australia, and Kazakhstan and Korea, and at the DeCordova Museum,Richmond, Susan. "Paper, Earth: An Installation with Steven Siegel," Wild Apples, Fall/Winter 2010. Arte Sella Sculpture Park (Italy),Morris, Roderick Conway. "An Italian Valley Where Nature Meets Art," The New York Times, August 6, 2010, p. E37. Retrieved August 4, 2021. Grounds for Sculpture,Bischoff, Dan. "A trio of fall attractions," The Star-Ledger, October 22, 2006. and Art Omi.Kimmelman, Michael. "The Hudson Valley, Inside and Out," The New York Times, July 30, 1999, p. E37. Retrieved August 4, 2021. Siegel lives and works in Tivoli in upstate New York.
Education and early career Siegel was born in White Plains, New York in 1953. He graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1976 with a BA degree and earned an MFA from Pratt Institute in 1978.Sharnoff, Elena. "Large Accumulations of Small Things," Non Satis Scire, Hampshire College, 2001, p. 19–22. After graduating, he lived in New York City's Chelsea district and worked as a carpenter, while producing abstract sculpture and drawings, often focused on interactions between man-made structures and landscape.Bolender, Karin. "Into the Holocene: The Art of Steven Siegel," Dutchess Magazine, February 2000, p. 25–7.Raynor, Vivian. "Diverse Sensibilities ," The New York Times, February 1, 1981, Sect. 11, p. 6. Retrieved August 4, 2021.Mahoney, Brian K. "It's About Time," American Craft Magazine, April/May 2015. Retrieved August 9, 2021. In the mid-1980s he became increasingly interested in geologic phenomena and concepts––most prominently John McPhee's notion of deep time—and began utilizing natural processes, such as sedimentation, stratification and compression, in his art.Gragg, Randy. "North Park Blocks sculpture," The Oregonian, August 5, 1993.
A commission for the Snug Harbor Sculpture Festival in 1990 shifted his work's direction. The festival was located on Staten Island, New York—then home to Fresh Kills, the world's largest landfill—which caused him to reflect on consumer waste as a future, human-generated "geology." In response, he created New Geology #1 (1990), a 15-foot-tall, ten-foot-wide cylinder made of recycled newspapers layered like shales and crowned with earth, grasses and flowers, which New York Times critic Michael Brenson wrote, "sprout[ed] from the ground like an ancient circular tomb."Brenson, Michael. "The State of the City as Sculptors See It," The New York Times, July 27, 1990, p. C1. Retrieved August 4, 2021.Raynor, Vivian. "Sculpture Show in the Open," The New York Times, September 16, 1990, p. NJ12. Retrieved August 4, 2021.
Over the next decade, Siegel gained wide recognition for related site-specific installations using pre- and post-consumer waste. These were generally commissioned for U.S. universities,Mah, Linda S. "Artist builds outdoor sculpture from wood and paper," Kalamazoo Gazette , September 22, 1997.Clarke, Jessica. "Eye-Catching Sculpture at JMU Features 30,000 Newspapers," Daily News-Record, April 3, 2001.Dupont, David. "Pop art," Sentinel-Tribune, Bowling Green, September 13, 2002, p. 1, 5. public parks and spaces,<ref name="Gragg93"/Zimmer, William. "A Smaller, More Accessible Biennial," The New York Times, June 24, 2001, p. WC14. Retrieved August 4, 2021. international exhibitions in Germany and Denmark, and venues such as the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Art Omi, and Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art.Johnson, Ken. "A Landfill in the Eyes of Artists Who Beheld It," The New York Times, February 1, 2002, p. E38. Retrieved August 4, 2021. He often designed the outdoor works to have an evolving, symbiotic relationship with their environments, including weathering and decomposition over long exhibition periods.Cassai, Mary. "Hudson Gallery features earth-centered sculptures," Kingston Daily Freeman, June 8, 2001, p. 8.
Work and critical reception Writers distinguish Siegel's work by its combination of traditional sculptural aesthetics (abstraction, centrality of form and composition, craftsmanship) and unconventional means, such as repurposed indigenous materials, scientific concepts and evolving processes derived from nature, and strategies involving organic development, change and risk, and collaboration.Moses, Monica. "The Nature of Risk," American Craft Magazine, April/May 2015. Retrieved August 9, 2021. His work raises contradictory notions of natural versus artificial, found versus constructed, growth and decay, and time as something ephemeral and enduring, intelligible and incomprehensible. Sculpture critic Patricia C. Phillips wrote, "There is a puzzling experience of dissonant beauty in these ungainly objects made of disposable, if not unsightly materials." Siegel fabricates his pieces through painstaking processes of accumulation that build to common forms such as boulders, vessels, geological formations, immense artifacts or topographical maps. Although not overtly political or message-oriented, they raise questions about consumption, waste and landscape, as well as sculptural practice itself in an eco-conscious world.
Public works (1990– ) Siegel's site-specific public works fall into three broad categories: time-bound, outdoor newspaper structures; organic, linear works primarily made with shredded rubber; and large cubes or spheres of bound waste materials, often crushed plastic or aluminum containers.
Siegel's newspaper works generally take monolithic, concentrated forms, such as cylinders, hives, walls or towers. They reference time through their layers of dated newsprint, methodical reiterative construction process, and gradual disintegration. Siegel's first fully realized such work was New Geology #2 (1992), a newspaper, stone and flora installation in the woods near his home in Milan, New York. It was undertaken as an experiment in change, decay and rebirth, and by 2000, had largely disappeared into a landscape of overgrown vegetation. Hood (Portland, 1993) was a thirteen-foot, cone-shaped sculpture topped by colorful flora, whose distinct layers were created by alternating placement of newspaper folds in or out. Siegel constructed Squeeze II (1998, Appalachian State University) from old school newspapers and sod, wedging an undulating structure between a grove of hemlocks, the organic curves creating a dialogue with the site's rolling hills.Sculpture, "Commissions, Steven Siegel," March 1999, p. 14. For Very Slow (1999, Art Omi), he constructed two newspaper towers in a stand of maple trees.
Later newspaper works include "Scale" (2002, Abington Art Center), Stories of Katrina (2005, Montalvo Arts Center), Bridge 2 (2009, Arte Sella, Italy), Suncheon Weave (2016, Korea), and Hill and Valley (2015, Sculpture in the Wild, Lincoln, MT), his largest newspaper piece.Leonard, Mary. "Tying Knots of Wow and Wonder: Sculptor Steven Siegel," About Town, Winter 2003. Writers have noted the cyclical "lifespan" of such works, from material origins in paper produced from trees, to art returned to the landscape, through biodegradation by fungi, mushrooms and molds into soil from which new trees grow.
While the integration of Siegel's newspaper works blur boundaries between natural and constructed forms, his linear installations using rubber suggest organic, sometimes menacing intrusions into architectural settings.Day, Sherri. "A Marketplace of Bulls and Bears Faces a New Bottom Line: Snakes," The New York Times, October 1, 2000, Sect. 14, p. 6.Van Gelder, Lawrence. "Footlights," The New York Times, May 22, 2001, p. E1. The indoor work Repose (1997, Atlanta) consisted of a dark mound of shredded tires atop a shale-like stack of juice cartons that twisted through a large exhibition space.Cullum, Jerry. "Recyclers create a whole new life from secondhand," The Atlanta Journal Constitution, April 11, 1997.Byrd, Cathy. "All Natural," Creative Loafing, April 12, 1997. For Carbon String (2001, Neuberger Museum of Art), he created a slender, playful 200-foot organic form that incongruously snaked its way through the otherwise austere architectural plaza of SUNY Purchase. The rubber tentacle or tree-root-like forms of Carbon (2013, Canberra, Australia)—Siegel's largest permanent public work—ooze from a soffit and across the façade of a multi-use building once home to Australia's Department of Climate Change.Goukassian, Elena. "Steven Siegel, Carbon," Sculpture, January 2014.
In other installations, Siegel created works in contrast to landscaped and idyllic sites that suggested both minimalist sculpture and functional objects such as collections of material en route to being recycled.Rugg, Judith. Exploring Site-Specific Art: Issues of Space and Internationalism, London I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2010. Retrieved August 4, 2021. For example, Bale (2001, University of Virginia) was a ten-foot, minimalist cube of crushed plastic bottles strapped together with rubber hose. Similar installations included Can Can (Bowling Green State University, 2002), a warped sphere of bound aluminum can discards; E-virus (2006, Stanford University), a cylinder formed from electronic waste; cubes of Grass Paper Glass (2006, Grounds For Sculpture), and Like a Buoy, like a Barrel (2019, Providence, RI), among others.Milkovits, Amanda. "Giant sculpture installed at the Innovation Center in downtown Providence was destroyed by fire," The Boston Globe, August 10, 2020. Retrieved August 12, 2021.
Studio work (2000– )