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."

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.