Steven Siegel

Steven Siegel (born 1953) is an American artist whose work includes public art, installation art, sculpture, collage and film. 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. 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.

His studio work has been exhibited at Marlborough Fine Art, Montalvo Arts Center, and the Drawing Center, among other venues. 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, Arte Sella Sculpture Park (Italy), Grounds for Sculpture, and Art Omi. Siegel lives and works in Tivoli in upstate New York.

Education and early career Siegel was born in White Plains, New York in 1953. 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.

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."

Over the next decade, Siegel gained wide recognition for related site-specific installations using pre- and post-consumer waste. public parks and spaces, international exhibitions in Germany and Denmark, and venues such as the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, He often designed the outdoor works to have an evolving, symbiotic relationship with their environments, including weathering and decomposition over long exhibition periods. 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. 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. For example, Bale (2001, University of Virginia) was a ten-foot, minimalist cube of crushed plastic bottles strapped together with rubber hose. Studio work (2000– ) In the 2000s, Siegel shifted his emphasis to studio work, producing abstract work inspired by evolutionary processes that ranged from intimate sculpture to ambitious multimedia installations. However, rather than imitate results in nature, Siegel appropriated its methodology, exploring simple, cumulative changes in "evolution" (i.e., the refinement of technique) that generate form from generation to generation (work to work). At 156 feet long, the mixed-media wall piece has only been viewed in large sections (of up to 100 feet) exhibited at Marlborough (2011, 2013) and the Albany Airport (2018– ) or digitally, via composite photographs. Subsequent films include 35 Pieces (2017) and An Art Video (2018).

Recognition Siegel has received awards and grants from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (2006), New York Foundation for the Arts (2001, 1981), Gunk Foundation (2000), ArtsLink Collaborative Projects (1999), The American-Scandinavian Foundation (1996), National Endowment for the Arts (1980), and Ford Foundation (1977), among others.