Elise Siegel (born 1952) is an American sculptor and installation artist based in New York City.Landi, Ann. "Elise Siegel," Sculpture Magazine, November/December 2019. Retrieved August 23, 2021.Princenthal, Nancy. "Elise Siegel at Garth Clark," Art in America, March 2005, p. 138. She is known for several bodies of figurative work that use subtle and ambiguous gesture and facial expression to evoke psychic and emotional states.Felshin, Nina. "Women's Work: A Lineage, 1966-94," Art Journal, Spring 1995, p. 71–85. Retrieved August 23, 2021.Welch, Adam. "Elise Siegel: The psychoanalytic construction of the work of art," Clay in Art International, 2006.Maine, Stephen. "Elise Siegel and Her Inscrutable Heads," Hyperallergic, January 19, 2019. Retrieved August 23, 2021. In the 1990s, she first gained recognition for garment-like constructions that blurred boundaries between clothing, skin and body, critiquing the roles fashion and plastic surgery play in the construction of sexual and cultural identity;Mancoff, Debra and Lindsay J. Bosch. Icons of Beauty: Art, Culture, and the Image of Women, Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2010, p. 237–8. Retrieved August 23, 2021. writer Mira Schor included Siegel among the cohort of artists she dubbed "Generation 2.5" and credited for developing the tropes of feminist art.Schor, Mira. "Generation 2.5," in A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life, Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2009. Retrieved August 24, 2021. After shifting to clay as her primary material, Siegel was one of a number of artists in the 2000s whose work spurred a rebirth in figurative ceramics emphasizing emotional expression, social conditions, identity and narrative.Koplos, Janet. "Pot or Not? The State of Ceramics Today," KC Studio, March/April 2016.Wayne, Leslie. "Immediate, physical, emotional: Studio visit with Elise Siegel," Two Coats of Paint, January 6, 2019. Retrieved August 23, 2021.Genocchio, Benjamin. "Ideas Abound in Clay: Ceramics That Go Beyond Bowls," The New York Times, November 28, 2008. Retrieved August 23, 2021. Her ceramic work—which ranges from roughly modeled portrait busts to highly charged, theatrical installations—is said to capture fleeting moments of internal struggle, conflict and vulnerability, creating a psychological tension with the viewer.Jones, Whitney. "Elise Siegel’s Rough Edges," Cfile, February 10, 2019. Retrieved August 23, 2021.Taplin, Robert. "Elise Siegel at Jane Hartsook," Art in America, December 2001.Shuster, Robert. "The Half-Boys," The Village Voice, May 1, 2007. Retrieved August 23, 2021.Siegel, Elise. "The Child Within the Adult," The Studio Potter, Winter/Spring 2008–9.
Siegel has exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH),Clark, Garth et al. Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Ceramics, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press/Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2012. Retrieved August 24, 2021. The Museum at FIT, Mississippi Museum of Art,Barrileaux, Rene. Work in Progress: Elise Siegel, Jackson, MS: Mississippi Museum of Art, 1997. Chazen Museum of Art,Panczenko, Russell and Garth Clark, Christy Wahl. The Human Condition: The Stephen and Pamela Hootkin Collection of Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture, Madison, WI: Chazen Museum of Art, 2014. Retrieved August 23, 2021. Neuberger Museum of ArtFelshin, Nina. Second Skin, Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art, 1993. and the Third World Ceramic Biennale in South Korea, among others.Rubin, Edward. "Scheon, Gwangju, and Teojo, South Korea – The 3rd World ceramic Biennale," Sculpture Magazine, January/February 2006, p. 78–9. Retrieved August 23, 2021.Greenwich House. Elise Siegel, Faculty. Retrieved August 23, 2021. She has received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts,Anonymous Was a Woman. "Previous Recipients." Retrieved August 23, 2021.Artforum. "NYFA Announces 2017 Fellows," News, July 7, 2017. Retrieved August 23, 2021. and her work belongs to the public art collections of MFAH and the Chazen Museum of Art.Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Elise Siegel, Into the Room of Dream/Dread I Abrupt Awake Clapping, Objects. Retrieved August 23, 2021.Chazen Museum of Art. Twenty-four Feet, Collection. Retrieved August 23, 2021. Siegel has taught ceramics at Greenwich House Pottery since 1984.
Early life and career Siegel was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1952. She studied at the University of Chicago from 1969 to 1971, before enrolling at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she earned a BFA and did postgraduate studies (1980–1). She focused on ceramics as an undergraduate, but after moving to New York City in 1982, explored other materials for roughly the first decade of her professional career.Sofer, Ken. "Elise Siegel," ARTnews, May 1987, p. 166. Musician and songwriter, Dick Siegel, is her brother.
Siegel first received attention in the 1980s for wall and floor sculptures exhibited at Laurie Rubin Gallery (her first solo show, 1987) and SculptureCenter in New York and at the Williams Center for the Arts at Lafayette College, among other venues.Tully, Judd. Made in New York, Easton, PA: Williams Center for the Arts, 1989. Siegel made these sculptures from sheets of wire mesh that she coated with layers of pigmented or painted modeling paste. After cutting the sheets up, she sewed the pieces together with wire to make volumetric forms, then twisted the constructions, creating rich surfaces of cracks, chips, and exposed veins of underpaint and mesh. While fully abstract, the sculptures conveyed anatomical or animistic qualities, often suggesting bodies with articulated, extending appendages. ARTnews likened them in color and texture to bone or fossils with hints of prior life and weathering, and in form, to the biomorphic abstractions of Eva Hesse, Jean Arp and Constantin Brâncuși.
Mature work and critical reception Throughout her mature career, Siegel has concentrated on three-dimensional work that emphasizes materials, the art-making process, and the human body and psyche. She has produced three broad bodies of work: feminist, garment-like constructions during the 1990s; figurative ceramic installations and sculpture during the latter 1990s and 2000s; and ceramic portrait busts in the 2010s.
Garment constructions (1990s) Beginning in 1991, Siegel took a more sociopolitical direction, employing feminist critique and psychological investigation in sculptures that resembled female-gendered clothing and referenced the body metaphorically through its absence.Zimmer, William. "Making Clothes Stand on Their Own," The New York Times, December 17, 1995, Sect. 13NJ, p. 18. Retrieved August 23, 2021. This work developed formally and materially out of her abstract sculpture and was widely shown in the first half of the decade, in group exhibitions—at the Neuberger Museum ("Empty Dress," 1993) and Museum at FIT ("Fashion Is a Verb," 1995), among others—and a solo show, "Second Skin" (College of Charleston, 1993). Siegel animated the garments (skirts, dresses, pinafores, corsets, bras and tutus) with wires that suggested hair, creating movement and allowing her to draw in space. Their patched and cracked, pigmented surfaces evoked skin, while straps and stitched wire seams suggested bandages and psychological/cultural constriction. Curator and writer Nina Felshin identified these works as "concrete aesthetic parallels" to contemporary cultural theory, which revealed the role of clothing in definitions and transformations of female identity by, in essence, turning social construction "inside out so the stitching shows."
In her "Portrait" series, Siegel created a series of bra forms in response to the Dow Corning breast implant crisis of 1992. It included Portrait #6 (1992), a corset and tutu doubling as a female torso that drew a connection between foundational garments that "mold and shape" and bodies altered by cutting into flesh.Shaw, Dan. "A Backdrop for the Color Black," The New York Times, January 30, 2015, p. RE1. Retrieved August 23, 2021. The sculpture's rough, tangled construction equated garment straps—both intimate and strangling—with medical bandages, while its frayed, faded edges and Frankensteinian wire stitching evoked struggle and damage, conveying a sense of horror regarding the movement to surgery as reinvention, which wounded as much as enhanced women. In another series, Siegel explored apron forms, employing webs of wire that simultaneously read as (pubic) hair and skirt (e.g., Hairskirt, 1993), alluding to the garment's original function as a protection against the "polluting" power of genitalia.Connor, Maureen. "Icons at Large," Artforum, November 1989, 26–8.
Figurative ceramic installations and sculpture In the mid-1990s, Siegel returned to clay, looking for a more immediate, tactile material from which to create directly figurative work. She initially produced fragments—ghostly heads, tightly clasped hands, dangling arms—before turning to installations of life-size, hollow doll or puppet-like figures, that Eleanor Heartney described as "psychologically complex tableaux of children of curiously ambiguous sexuality."Heartney, Eleanor. "Bad Girls', in The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium by Helaine Posner, Eleanor Heartney, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2014. Retrieved August 23, 2021.Johnson, Ken. "From the Neck Up," The New York Times, August 8, 2003, p.E31. Retrieved August 23, 2021. Village Voice critic Robert Shuster wrote that these works derived an uncanny, foreboding power from what he called "Siegel's process of golem-like creation," a schematic form of modeling that foregrounded a sutured together look with rotating parts and misalignments. She hand-built the figures whole out of clay coils, cut them into parts to fit into the kiln, then reassembled them, leaving visible seams along shoulders, wrists and waists, with heads sometimes resting at awkward angles.
Siegel's installations combined carefully arranged stagecraft and a precise sense of gesture and choreography to create ambiguous scenes with the uncanny quality of dreams. Her first, Into the room of dream/dread, I abrupt awake clapping (2001), was installed in a heavily curtained, dimmed gallery, and consisted of seven seated children arrayed in a loose circle around another child, in an uncertain place of honor or reproach.Princenthal, Nancy. Into the room of dream/dread I abrupt awake clapping, New York: Jane Hartsook Gallery, 2001. The figures were colored a dull, even gray and modeled in doughy fashion, with simple, punched-in eyes, detailed extremities, and separately fired heads set on small wedges so they could be rotated to fix the gazes. Seated upright with tense dangling feet and hands in front of their chests arrested in the act of clapping—excepting the central child—the children tilted their heads inquisitively toward the gallery entrance, mouths slightly ajar in silence. Reviewers noted the eerie reversal of focus—which made viewers the center of attention, as if they had interrupted a conversation or game at a moment of expectancy or dread—as an effective means of evoking a sense of repression and anxiety associated with childhood.