Setha Low

Setha Low, a Los Angeles native transplanted to the East End, spent her earlier life doing research in Central America, Western Europe, Africa, and Japan as well as teaching anthropology, environmental psychology, and urban design at the University of Pennsylvania and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of many books including Why Public Space Matters, Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place, On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture and Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America.

Setha began sculpting in 2002 and at the urging to two artist friends joined the Crazy Monkey Gallery.  She experiments with smoke-firing using sawdust and wood chips and participates in community raku firings to achieve her luminous ceramic surfaces. In her Northwest Woods studio, she creates vibrating tubular sculptures, large acrylic paintings, and prepares monoprints printed at The Church in Sag Harbor. Ms. Low considers the artistic process to be a co-creation between the medium, and the imagination, with form evolving organically through movement.

There is a resonance between her art and cultural writing.  Both uncover people’s relationships to the natural and built environment through an exploration of embodied space.  Her suggestive forms express the emotions and entanglements of everyday life grounded in materiality of the body. Her wall pieces are landscapes of the inner self, while her free-standing sculptures evoke the experience and trauma of women in diverse cultures, times, and places.  These topographies of the body become contact zones of engagement between the artist and viewer that draw upon symbolic meanings, affective resonances, and a collective politics.  

Ms. Low’s ceramics, tiles, sculptures, prints, and paintings are held in private collections and the Tile Club collection of Guild Hall. She participates in solo, juried, and invitational art exhibitions throughout the East End of Long Island and New York City and donates to charity events that support social justice, art as a community focus, and human rights.

"My artwork examines the social, political, and cultural struggles of women through abstract and figurative representations that evoke an emotional response. These paintings, monoprints, and ceramic and metal sculptures draw upon my experiences as an anthropologist in places where survival is precarious and inspiring.  Based on this fieldwork, I understand art as a special form of culture that affects people directly and non-verbally through an encounter.

While I use a variety of materials and processes in each project, the meta-methodology is consistent. I work quickly to capture feelings and other primary processes directing my energy into the material--often clay, metal mesh and tubing, paper, canvas or plaster. While the subject matter of a piece determines the materials and its form, I prefer mediums that I can manipulate intuitively and that reflect the intensity of my handling.  Each project consists of multiple works on specific themes and meanings, while new areas of interest invariably arise and lead to the next body of work."