Glen Seator

Glen Seator (1956-2002) was an American visual artist and conceptual sculptor. He lived in Brooklyn, NY and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Early life Born Glen Thomas Seator in 1956 in Beardstown, Illinois to mother, Lynette Hubbard Seator (d. 2012), a professor of Modern Languages, and father Gordon Douglas Seator (d. 1988), a judge. While growing up his family lived in the small community of Mount Sterling.

Education Seator attended high school in Jacksonville, Illinois, where he skipped a year. Upon graduation, he used earnings from minimum-wage employment to travel throughout the world for nine months. as well as the transformation of a townhouse he owned in the historical neighborhood of Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn into a work of installation art. In 2000-2001 his work was featured in a two-person exhibition, The Architectural Unconscious: James Casebere and Glen Seator, at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. The show traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

Seator's first one-person shows were held in New York City in 1991, at the SculptureCenter and Art in General.

Preventative Measures, (1994). Installation at the National Gallery of Contemporary Art (Zaçheta), in Warsaw, Poland, Seator meticulously covered the ornate Neo-Renaissance-style salon walls with horizontal strips of masking tape, creating "an etherial yet overwhelming image of itself." The installation covered 8,000 square feet of wall space. The 10,000 pound off-kilter structure was anchored to the floor with three steel cables. In his essay, Glen Seator's Daring Desiring Machines art critic Terry R. Myers describes the work as "dangerous minimalism," and compares Seator's work to that of Bruce Nauman and Michael Asher.

B.D.O. (Breuer Director's Office), (1997). Installation commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art for the 1997 Whitney Biennial, was a reconstruction of a full-scale office tilted at a 45-degree angle; an exact replication of the museum director's office. Art critic David Joselit wrote that the artwork enabled spectators to "carefully scrutinize" reality. Seator recreated every micro-detail of the outside street, including sidewalk cracks with bits of grass, chipped red curb paint, and graffiti on a telephone pole. The installation was created from 150 tons of concrete, asphalt and other building materials. In addition to the street scene, Seator also replicated the front exterior western facade of the gallery inside the gallery.

Fifteen Sixty One, (1999). Commissioned by the Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA, in 1999, was an exact replica of a check-cashing store located in a Latino neighborhood on Sunset Boulevard. The project highlighted the economic disparity between Beverly Hills and the Latino neighborhood. The project critiqued the advertising industry, and shed light on the role of corporate identity. In 2002, Hatje Cantz Publishers in conjunction with the MAK Center published the book, Glen Seator: Moving Still, documenting a decade of his work.

Awards and honors Seator was awarded grants and fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Soros Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2000. His work was the subject of a symposium, Moving Things, Moving Places: The Work of artist Glen Seator, at the Getty Research Institute of the Getty Museum in 2002. He received two fellowships from the MacDowell Colony in 1990 and 1994.

Collections Seator's work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among other public and private collections.

Legacy The 12 Duffield Glen Seator Foundation was established in 2004, and has been working with Steidl Verlag Publishers on a catalogue raisonné of his work, to be titled, Glen Seator: Making Things Moving Places.