Elise Siegel

rdf:langString Elise Siegel

rdf:langString Elise Siegel

rdf:langString Elise Siegel

rdf:langString Newark, New Jersey, U.S.

rdf:langString Anonymous Was A Woman Award, New York Foundation for the Arts, Virginia A. Groot Foundation

rdf:langString Sculpture, installation art

rdf:langString American

rdf:langString Elise Siegel (born 1952) is an American sculptor and installation artist based in New York City. She is known for several bodies of figurative work that use subtle and ambiguous gesture and facial expression to evoke psychic and emotional states. 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; writer Mira Schor included Siegel among the cohort of artists she dubbed "Generation 2.5" and credited for developing the tropes of feminist art. 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. 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. Siegel has exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH), The Museum at FIT, Mississippi Museum of Art, Chazen Museum of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art and the Third World Ceramic Biennale in South Korea, among others. She has received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her work belongs to the public art collections of MFAH and the Chazen Museum of Art. Siegel has taught ceramics at Greenwich House Pottery since 1984.