Jene Highstein

Jene Highstein was a prolific sculptor and architect whose work spanned over five decades. Though he favored monumental forms, he was adept in a wide range of media, including stone, metal, wood, glass, concrete, and resin.

He earned a BA in philosophy from the University of Maryland in 1963, completed postgraduate work in philosophy at the University of Chicago, and committed himself to art practice in 1966. He then went on to study drawing at the New York Studio School before earning a Post Graduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 1970.

Beginning in the late 1960s, he started to work in large-scale, simplified sculptural forms, and monochromatic images on paper—often the formal foundation for future works, and displayed along with sculptures. Highstein's early works of curved steel sheets and geometric pipes largely reflected the minimalist aesthetics of the time. Highstein's work then evolved with the application and manipulation of wood, stone, glass, and concrete by hand, creating what appeared to be organic, fundamental forms. His 1977 piece Flying Saucer was a hulking, dark, biomorphic shape installed at Governors State University in University Park, Illinois, by hand-troweling concrete over an armature. Later works have shifted from dark representations of negative space to paler forms that emphasize dimension and fullness, with subtly hand-shaped surfaces. [1]

Highstein has received a number of awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts grants, a John Simon Guggenheim Award, and a St. Gaudens Memorial Prize. His public sculptures are installed at sites including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Carnegie Bank collection, Stockholm; and the Villa e Collezione Panza Villa Litta, Varese, Italy; and he has had solo exhibitions at the Hartford Art Center, West Hartford, Connecticut (2000); Art Museum of Memphis (2001); and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens, New York (2003), among others. In 1998, he produced a theater production, Flatland, for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, and in 2004 he collaborated with the architect Steven Holl on an ice structure for the Snow Show in Finnish Lapland. The following year, a group of his sculptures was exhibited in Madison Square Park, New York, sponsored by the Madison Square Park coalition.

Jene Highstein died on April 27, 2013 in Salem, New York.

[1] https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/jene-highstein