Lisa Sigal

Lisa Sigal (b. 1962, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She received a B.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art in 1985 and an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Art in 1989, and is currently co-curating Open Sessions, a new program for artists at The Drawing Center. Sigal has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Art; the Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland; and is a 2014-2015 artist-in-residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program. She is a 2012 ArtMatters Foundation grantee and Creative Capital grantee, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship awardee, a 2002 NYFA grantee and received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Elizabeth Foundation Grant in 1998. Her work has been exhibited at numerous venues internationally including, the 2008 Whitney Biennial, New York; The New Museum, New York; MoMa /PS1, New York; The Sculpture Center, New York; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; The Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Essl Museum, Vienna, Austria; LAXART, Los Angeles; and Samson Projects, Boston, among other venues. Upcoming exhibitions include the DeCordova Museum in Boston, the Brooklyn Museum, Inside Out Art Museum in Beijing, and a residence and solo show at The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.

Lisa Sigal (b. 1962) is known for her fusion of installation, sculpture, and painting in site-specific works that poetically illuminate the architectural possibilities of the paint medium and create fluctuation in the boundaries between art and functional shelter. This fluctuation urges us to actively consider architecture’s effect on our experience of both physical/exterior and subconscious/interior spaces. Do houses tell stories? Can walls hold memories? In Sigal’s body of work, the borders between the imagined (or artistic) realm and that of the real purposefully bleed into one another. Her new projects continue to sit on the fuzzy and ever-shifting margin of those two worlds, allowing us to see a little art in our everyday environments and thereby transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.

For Prospect.3, Sigal presents a new, site-specific installation in partnership with the eminent playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, “Blights Out” (a local initiative to use art to bring agency in development to New Orleans’s communities), and a multitude of partnering artists, architects, and urban planners. Sigal has transformed derelict houses throughout the city into vessels of their own “memories,” equipping them with the words needed for both their private and their public histories to be read and reexamined. A selection of texts from Parks’s 365 Days/365 Plays (2002–3) are painted on Tyvek and adhered to the houses, giving voice to the architecture. By probing the fate of the blighted houses through art, Sigal urges New Orleanians to re-see the visual, historical, psychological, and emotional value of such spaces in their city, especially as urban redevelopment continues apace in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. These altered properties engage the audience in a philosophical inquiry into the question of collective versus individual memory of space, and architecture’s function in those equations.