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. 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. 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." 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." Jeanne Silverthorne, Pneuma Machine (in daylight and glowing in the dark), kinetic rubber sculpture, dimensions variable, 2005.

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. 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. Silverthorne is based in New York and has taught at the School of Visual Arts since 1993.

Education and early career Jeanne Silverthorne was born in 1950 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 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. 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). 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; New York Times critic Roberta Smith described them as "burnt offerings, small catastrophes that have just walked out of a cartoon." Artforum noted in this project a sense of profound loss and romanticism beneath "cool strategies." 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";

Jeanne Silverthorne, Knothole, rubber and phosphorescent pigment, 24.25" x 20.5" x 5", 2011.

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. These works make explicit her studio-as-body metaphor, yet their swarming patterns, swirls and protuberances also portray the body as foreign and strange. 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." 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.

In later work, Silverthorne shifted to floral reliefs (e.g., Knothole, 2011). Her 2008 McKee show featured blue, white and pink blossoms, dead-black rubber frames, and feeding bees, ladybugs and flies that Artforum described as "lurid vitality coexist[ing] with decay." Her show at The Phillips Collection (2013) was a tragicomic exploration of the classical vanitas themes of the transience of life and beauty and futility of pleasure, which juxtaposed paintings from the museum's vaults with her own sculptures and reliefs such as Phosphorescent Pink With Flies and Dandelion Clock.

Jeanne Silverthorne, Jeanne (Up and Down), rubber and phosphorescent pigment, 9" high, 2008. Silverthorne also created portraits of family members and close friends in luminescent rubber (e.g., of her mother, in Under a Cloud, 2003), The portraits often include a subject's actual hair and DNA reports that trace genetic ancestry back over thousands of years and provide unique genetic "fingerprints." Her 2008 McKee show included Untitled (Bad Ideas), a discard bin overflowing with lightbulbs (all cast in rubber), and Pneuma Machine (2005), a kinetic installation of interconnected, small rubber appliances in phosphorescent yellow-bone color that intermittently shuddered to motorized life, which critics likened to an operating table or to the work of Samuel Beckett, but in sculpture. Later shows featured vignettes that served as metaphors for Silverthorne and her creative process: casts of her studio floor invaded by weeds and insects; a moth drawn to light; Suicidal Sunflower (2014), a black-and-white flower strangled by an electric cord noose; Self-Portrait as a Fly With Glasses (2017). The Brooklyn Rail compared her dull, cast lightbulbs (that can't shine) and outlets without electricity to corporeal phantoms, like the fictional monster, that imitate perfectly but are divorced from the reality; the show included the sculpture Frankenstein, a glowing book propped open on a plinth with text meticulously copied from original in invisible ink that was made visible by UV light. The exhibition, which subsequently traveled to the Arts Center at Duck Creek in East Hampton, NY and Project ArtSpace in New York City (2023), showcased conceptual and formal affinities of the two artists' work. "The dichotomy between ugly and beautiful is foundational for both artists," wrote curator Terry Sultan in the catalog for the exhibition, "as is the recognition that tough topics are often best addressed and alleviated with humor."

Awards and collections Silverthorne was recognized with a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2017, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in 2010, and an Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 1996, the award's inaugural year. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albright–Knox Gallery, RISD Museum, and Weatherspoon Art Museum, among others.

Other sources Flynn, Tom. The Body in Three Dimensions, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998. Isaak, Jo Anna. Feminism and Contemporary Art, New York: Routledge, 1996. Seigel, Jeanne. "Eva Hesse’s Influence Today? Conversations with Three Contemporary Artists," Art Journal, Summer, 2004, p. 72–88. Von Hardenberg, Irene. Im Atelier, Gerstenberg Verlag, 2005.