Jeanne Silverthorne with Douglas Dreishpoon

Jeanne Silverthorne is an acclaimed and influential New York-based artist whose works take their cue from the human body, as well as domestic and industrial items including lighting fixtures and bulbs, junction boxes, and various packing materials. For decades, she has thought of her studio as a generative site where acts of thinking, making, destroying, and accepting take place.

Her practice involves an archaeology of collapse and entropy. Since the early 1990’s, she has been excavating the conceptual and physical ruins of the studio whose outmoded infrastructure and lost artifacts, art forms, actions and people produce a contemporary vanitas. Unearthing what has been buried in the rubble, bringing the concealed to light suggests “deep storage” and many works address what is invisible or packed away. Since 2007 she has been making a functional rubber crate for every sculpture.

Douglas Dreishpoon, Chief Curator Emeritus at the Albright-Knox, is currently Director of the Catalogue Raisonné project at the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York City. His 26 years of experience in museums include such roles as Curator of Collections at the Weatherspoon Art Museum at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (1995–1998) and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida (1991–1995).

His essays, interviews, and reviews have been published in numerous catalogues, magazines, and journals, including Art in America, Art Journal, ARTnews, and Sculpture. Recent publications include The Long Curve: 150 Years of Visionary Collecting at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Skira, 2011); Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980–2008 (Scala, 2009); ROBERT MANGOLD: Beyond the Line | Paintings and Project 2000–2008 (Abrams, 2009); Ken Price: Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Works on Paper, 1962–2010 (The Drawing Center, 2013); Giving Up One’s Mark: Helen Frankenthaler in the 1960s and 1970s (2014); Imperfections by Chance: Paul Feeley Retrospective, 1954–1965 (2015); and Nothing and Everything: Seven Artists, 1947–1962 (Hauser & Wirth, 2017).

A former board member of the American Section of the International Association of Art Critics, Dreishpoon holds a Bachelor of Arts from Skidmore College, a master’s degree from Tufts University, and a PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is a Consulting Editor at the Brooklyn Rail.