James Siena

Methodically Abstract

By Grace Sachi Troxell, M.F.A. '21

When James Siena (B.F.A. '79) was pondering what to study in college, he initially thought that illustration was his path. But when he interviewed at Parsons, he was told, "You're not an illustrator. You're a fine artist. That's what you're going to be." He ended up studying fine arts at Cornell at the suggestion of his father's friend, San Francisco Bay Area painter Nathan Oliveira, and taking courses in photography with Professor Emeritus Stanley Bowman and printmaking with the late Stephen Poleskie. Kenneth Evett, chair of the Department of Art, was supportive of Siena throughout his four years and bought one of his pieces — for $50 — when he graduated. 

While at Cornell, Siena was immersed in art but also took advantage of the larger university, taking art history with Robert Hobbs and Peter Kahn, anthropology with Robert Asher, and an astronomy course with Joanna Rankin. Kahn had been a student of painter Hans Hofmann, and part of the charm of his courses was hearing anecdotes about Hofmann. 

Under Kahn's tutelage, Siena also learned about materials. He visited Kahn's studio in his country home in Trumansburg, New York, where Kahn ground his own pigments. Reflecting on this experience, Siena muses, "He influenced me so significantly that I actually made my own paint for years after." Siena's was no ordinary paint, though; hair and glue were pressed into molds that became blocks of paint. 

During his Cornell years, Siena saw the exhibition Jim Dine Prints: 1970–1977 at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, which proved to be another major influence. In the exhibition catalog, Siena read a description of Dine's technique of soft-ground etching on roofer's copper. He then ordered roofer's copper and made his own acid baths. Throughout the past 20 years, he has made more than 150 editions of prints with various printshops. A prolific printmaker, he began his experimentation at Cornell. 

After graduating, in exchange for painting his father's house inside and out, Siena procured a roundtrip flight to Europe. Following this trip, in 1982 he ended up in New York City at the age of 24. In his early years there, he found creative outlets in joining the performance art collective Watchface and painting. In his dirt-floor studio on Ludlow Street, Siena painted on silk using Peter Kahn's ground-paint recipes. 

During this time, he was employed at Bark Frameworks, where he started sanding frames and worked in the matting department. This job would prove to be influential, as he saw myriad artists' works being framed there, including Jasper Johns and Chuck Close. Close would later become a friend as well as a collaborator in a two-person Eli Broad Lecture for Cornell at the Morgan Library in 2012. During the lecture, Siena and Close described each other's work and discussed how to "build" a painting. At Bark Frameworks, he also learned about the proper care of artwork. He left after two and a half years to become an independent picture framer, naming his business Mildred Corners after a building he lived in. The precision and compression that he practiced during this time can be seen in the artworks he makes now. 

Siena had his first New York solo show at Pierogi Gallery in 1996. Then, between 2000 and 2003, he exhibited with Gorney Bravin + Lee, before joining Pace Gallery in 2005, which has represented him ever since. He has had six solo shows at Pace, which have ranged from his "pocket Hercules" intricate enamel paintings on aluminium and grotesque drawings that involve the body, to vector-based constructions inspired by dried grape stems, and his most recent turn toward large-scale paintings on canvas. 

"I love being smaller than a painting, because I've been larger than the paintings for all these years," Siena said, explaining his recent shift in scale. Regardless of scale and medium, in Siena's work, the sense of the line predominates. In each of his pieces a particular nature of the line seems to have emerged intuitively, but Siena has then pursued that nature methodically and with an almost brutal thoroughness, thereby creating a trance-like tension that allows for extraordinarily deep looking.  

Siena's work is included in collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; MoMA; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Hammer Museum; and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, among others. He shows no sign of slowing down. Siena has a new show every year and is currently working toward one that will go up this summer at the Baronian Xippas gallery in Brussels, Belgium. In collaboration with his partner, Katia Santibañez, he is working toward an upcoming exhibition at Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, New York; this will be the first joint exhibition the husband-and-wife duo has created together. Siena received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of fine arts in 2021.

Website: PaceGallery.com — James Siena