Jeanne Silverthorne

Jeanne Silverthorne (born 1950) is an American sculptor, known for cast-rubber sculptures and installations that explore the artist's studio as a metaphor for artistic practice, the human body and psyche, and mortality.Cotter, Holland. "Jeanne Silverthorne," The New York Times, August 13, 1999, p. E36. Retrieved June 16, 2020.Riley, Jan. "New Life in the Ruins of the Artist's Studio" Sculpture, June 2011, p. 26–31. Retrieved June 13, 2020.Kimmelman, Michael. Review, The New York Times, March 7, 1997, p. C29. Retrieved June 16, 2020. She gained prominence in New York City in the 1990s, as one of several material-focused sculptors who critiqued the austere, male-dominated Minimalist movement by embracing humble, unorthodox media and hand-made, personal and ephemeral qualities championed by artists such as Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois.Canning, Susan. "Jeanne Silverthorne," Sculpture, October 1996.Harrison, Helen A. Review, The New York Times, November 14, 1993, Sect. 13LI, p. 23. Retrieved June 16, 2020.Neff, Eileen. "Jeanne Silverthorne," Artforum, October 1996, p. 135–6. Retrieved June 16, 2020.Glueck, Grace. "Jeanne Silverthorne," The New York Times, May 12, 2000, p. E36. Retrieved June 16, 2020. She treats the studio as a physical and conceptual site to be excavated, documented and inventoried, examining in the words of Sculpture's Jan Riley "the end of studio arts … and the impossibility of this mode of expression regaining its former creative validity and vitality in today’s world."Riley, Jan. "Jeanne Silverthorne, Marc Strauss Gallery," Sculpture, July 2018, p. 68. Retrieved June 13, 2020.Shaheen, Steve. "Sculptors on Sculpture, Part 2," ArtInfo, March 6, 2015.Weiner, Daniel. "Jeanne Silverthorne," RomanovGrave, February 3, 2020. Retrieved June 13, 2020. Art in America critic Raphael Rubinstein wrote that, like the late studio paintings of Philip Guston, Silverthorne examines "deeply melancholic realms, enlivened by the occasional mordant joke, in which lowly objects are relentlessly and lovingly queried for a meaning they never seem quite ready to yield."Rubinstein, Raphael. "The Powers of Magnification," Art in America, June 1997, p. 100–3.

Silverthorne has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and Anonymous Was a Woman Award, among others, and her art has been acquired by institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.Artforum. "Guggenheim Foundation Announces 2017 Fellows," April 7, 2017. Retrieved June 13, 2020.Dobrzynski Judith H. "Anonymous Gifts for Art, So Women Creating It Aren't," The New York Times, October 12, 1997, p. 1. Retrieved June 13, 2020.Smith, Roberta. "One Collection, Many Stories From the Land of Mavericks," The New York Times, May 12, 2006, p. E27. Retrieved June 16, 2020.San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Jeanne Silverthorne, Uvula and Tongue 2001, Artwork. Retrieved June 20, 2020. She has exhibited internationally, in solo shows at the Phillips Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (ICAP) and PS1, and group exhibitions at MoMA, Albright-Knox Gallery and Haus der Kunst (Munich), among others.Levin, Kim. "Wired." The Village Voice, August 17, 1999. Retrieved June 16, 2020.Miokovic, Alex and Heidi Nickisher. "Narrating the Visceral Object," Rochester City News, December 3, 2003. Retrieved June 20, 2020.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. "Jeanne Silverthorne," Fellows. Retrieved June 13, 2020. Silverthorne is based in New York and has taught at the School of Visual Arts since 1993.School of Visual Arts. Jeanne Silverthorne, Faculty. Retrieved June 20, 2020.

Education and early career Jeanne Silverthorne was born in 1950 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After earning a BA from Temple University in 1971, she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and married environmental lawyer, publisher and author Robert Emmet Hernan, before returning to Temple to complete an MA degree (1974).Irish Environment. About Robert Emmet Hernan. Retrieved June 27, 2020. For most of the 1980s, she split time between New York City and Philadelphia, making sculpture, exhibiting in both cities, teaching, and writing art, film and theater reviews for Artforum; in 1988 she permanently settled in New York.Ostrow, Saul. "Jeanne Silverthorne by Saul Ostrow," Bomb Magazine, Summer 1990. Retrieved June 13, 2020.Silverthorne, Jeanne. "Miriam Shapiro," Artforum, June 1981, p. 93–4. Retrieved June 22, 2020.Silverthorne, Jeanne. "David Mamet's Oleanna", Artforum, March 1993. Retrieved June 22, 2020.

Her early work balanced conceptual interests in the body, everyday objects, and linguistic and artistic representation with materialist concerns for mass, tactility and surface, which she explored in cast hydrocal or epoxy table and floor sculptures.Smith, Roberta. Review, The New York Times, June 15, 1990, p. C20. Retrieved June 16, 2020.Schaffner, Ingrid. Review. "Jeanne Silverthorne," Sculpture, December 1990. This work included cast prosthetic devices, often paired with short phrases suggesting loss or lack; piles of jumbled-ribbon with wind-up keys ("DNA sculptures") that portrayed genetic code as a messy, disorderly toy and scientific descriptions of life as inadequate; a primitive, Venus of Willendorf-type torso; and cast objects representing ideas (Light Bulbs, 1986; Thought Bubble, 1987).Gookin, Kirby. "Jeanne Silverthorne," Artforum, October 1990, p. 165–6. Retrieved June 16, 2020.Rubinstein, Raphael. "Shapes of Things to Come," Art in America, November 1995. Reviews characterize these sculptures as anti-heroic, anti-formalist, anthropomorphic and reminiscent of aspects of work by Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Fischli & Weiss and Richard Tuttle, among others;"The New Yorker," Review. July 2, 2003.Leigh, Christian. "Jeanne Silverthorne, Christine Burgin Gallery," Contemporanea, November 1990.Raynor Vivien. "Politics of Blame on Display in Hartford," The New York Times, February 16, 1992, p. CN32. Retrieved June 16, 2020. New York Times critic Roberta Smith described them as "burnt offerings, small catastrophes that have just walked out of a cartoon."

Mature work: the artist's studio Beginning in the early 1990s, Silverthorne turned her attention to the artist's studio, regarded as a romantic anachronism or ruin, including its outmoded infrastructure and sculptural tradition, objects and tools, detritus, and the artist herself.Arning, Bill. "Two Serious Ladies," The Village Voice, April 9, 1996, p.82. She exploited the fleshy, light-deadening nature of cast rubber and dramatic shifts in scale (microscopic views, miniatures, extreme enlargements) to give ordinary elements qualities of absurdity, futility, morbidity and unfamiliarity.Cotter, Holland. Review, The New York Times, September 16, 1994, p. C29. Retrieved June 16, 2020.Princenthal, Nancy. "Jeanne Silverthorne," Art in America, November 1994. Conceptually, this work investigates metaphors for the human body and its systems, the artist's creative process and psyche, decay, and the exhaustion of studio-art conventions of authorship and the hand, mastery and mimesis, originality, and timelessness;Baker, Kenneth. "Silverthorne Pipes Meaning into Existential Sculptures," San Francisco Chronicle, September 1, 2002, p. D10.Weiner, Daniel. "A Letter to Raphael Rubinstein," The Brooklyn Rail, April 2012. Retrieved June 13, 2020. Artforum noted in this project a sense of profound loss and romanticism beneath "cool strategies."

Silverthorne gained increasing attention through the decade with exhibitions at Rocca Paolina (Italy), ICA Boston, Wright Museum of Art, Deste Foundation (Athens) and the Whitney Museum, among others.Smith, Roberta. "The Horror: Updating the Heart of Darkness," The New York Times, June 1, 1997, Sect. 2, p. 33. Retrieved June 16, 2020. Critics describe these exhibitions as sardonically humorous, sprawling arrangements of cast, excavated studio objects—often forming Rube Goldberg-like systems or organisms—unified by snaking skeins of wires, cables and tubes connected to cast outlets, transformers and fuse boxes that functioned like drawings in space.Glueck, Grace. "The Antithesis of Minimalism's Cool Geometry; Fleshy Rubber," The New York Times, February 13, 1998, p. E40. Retrieved June 16, 2020. Her 1994 McKee Gallery show featured an immense, nonfunctional cast chandelier hung at eye-level; Holland Cotter described the show as a perfectly preserved, perverse industrial dystopia with "a post-Vesuvian chill." Michael Kimmelman called her 1997 show "good creepy fun" that made "the inorganic organic [and] the functional functionless."

In exhibitions at ICAP (1996) and the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris (1999), Silverthorne reworked tiny casting fragments resembling packing-case noodles into large black rubber sculptures that offered an ironic, absurdist take on the persistence of 19th-century artistic tropes and contemporary desperation for new visual forms. The Whitney installation (The Studio Stripped Bare, Again, referencing Duchamp) featured swags of black electrical cords hung from a high atrium ceiling and spilled across floors, which converged on a grey, cast light bulb suspended over two of the tiny fragments under a magnifying glass.Gibson, Wesley. "Jeanne Silverthorne," New Art Examiner, December 1999–January 2000.Arning, Bill. "Jeanne Silverthorne: The Studio Stripped Bare Again," Time Out (New York), September 2–9, 1999. Village Voice critic Kim Levin called the bulb—a cartoon signifier of artistic inspiration—a sinister, "imploded metaphor of modern genius" that Silverthorne switched off, extinguishing "the whole modern project"; Artforum'''s David Frankel described the show as "a haunted meditation on artmaking and productivity, body and thought, inspiration and inertia."Frankel, David. "Jeanne Silverthorne, Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris," Artforum, January 2000. Retrieved June 13, 2020.

Framed reliefs and machines Silverthorne's late-1990s Whitney and McKee shows also featured flesh- and ochre-colored reliefs based on microscopic views of human skin and glands, which she enlarged, molded and cast, and framed in ornate, black cast-latex frames.Jeanne Silverthorne website. Works 2013–1986. Retrieved June 20, 2020. These works make explicit her studio-as-body metaphor, yet their swarming patterns, swirls and protuberances also portray the body as foreign and strange.Sheets, Hilarie. "The Mod Bod," ARTnews, June 2001. Retrieved June 16, 2020. Reviews liken them to surrealistic alien terrains, giant Victorian cameos gone mad, abstract paintings or grotesque fairy-tale mirrors engendering "cycles of fascination and disgust."Taplin, Robert. "Jeanne Silverthorne at McKee," Art in America, February 2001.

In subsequent exhibitions, Silverthorne fashioned the reliefs as objectified emotional states, often in conjunction with machine-like apparatuses. Fear Machine and Tear Machine (2002, Shoshana Wayne Gallery) connected the reliefs Dry Mouth (2002) and Aching (2001) through cords, pipes and switches to apparent "emotional engines" that Los Angeles Times critic Holly Myers characterized as "simultaneously beautiful and grotesque, delicate and monstrous."Myers, Holly. "Bas-Relief abstractions Give New Form to Human Emotions," Los Angeles Times, February 28, 2002. Retrieved June 13, 2020. Big Grief and Little Grief (2003, McKee) conjoined reliefs of a throat and tear ducts to, respectively, a rubber speaker emitting an empty word-balloon and a pipe yielding a cartoon teardrop.Johnson, Ken. Review, The New York Times, May 23, 2003, p. E36. Retrieved June 16, 2020.