Sienna Shields

Shields was born in Alaska in 1976. Both her parents were teachers and she and two siblings were home-schooled for a time while living outside Anchorage.[2] She graduated from Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon with a degree in Caribbean and Latin American history in 1998.[2] in 2001, she moved to the DUMBO collective in Brooklyn.[2]

Shields's working process has been influenced by the "energy and chaos" of the collectives in which she lived for much of her working life.[3] Many of her works are variations on collages of acrylic paint and multiple layers of cut or torn paper, assembled into large abstract pieces. [2] She developed this working style after college in part due to financial restraints.[3] Other works include bead sculptures, mixed media art, and digital imagery.

The Whitney Biennial of contemporary art is an invitation-only exhibition which generally favors young artists and in the past helped bring greater recognition to artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock and Jeff Koons.[4] The Biennial has often faced criticism over issues of privilege, access and inclusivity.[5] Shields organized the Yams Collective (short for HowDoYouSayYaminAfrican?) of 38 international mostly black and queer musicians, poets, actors, writers and visual artists to create a digital film about racial identity for the 2014 edition.[1] Shields was encouraged by this diversity, saying: "I’d go to art events, and I’d be the only black person in the room — here in New York. It was ridiculous."[1] One of the Biennial's curators, Michelle Grabner, had visited Shields in her studio and seen a short video loop she had made in Alaska.[1] This became the instigation for the collective's submission, a 53-minute digital piece in 35 parts titled Good Stock on the Dimension Floor: An Opera.[1]

Despite the collective's membership, one of the few individual black female artists invited that year was "Donelle Woolford", a creation of Joe Scanlan.[6] Scanlan, a white, male, Princeton University professor hired a succession of actresses to play "Woolford" at events. The inclusion of this "fake" artist led the Yams Collective to withdraw their submission,objecting to "Woolford's" inclusion in a show alongside their work.[7] Shields explained the withdrawal was due to not only Scanlan but also:"...the history of the Whitney and its lack of any kind of initiative in changing its white supremacist attitudes."[8] The collective also considered the inclusion of Scanlan to be a reflection of larger issues of racism in the elite art world.[9] The film instead premiered at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival.[10]

Shields married fellow artist Chuck Close in 2013[15] and he included her as a subject in his 2017 series Subway Portraits although they had by that time divorced.[16]

• Whitney Museum of American Art
• Artivism
• Chuck Close

• Official website
• Photographic blog
• Portraits with artwork
• The Yams Collective