JAMES SIENA

Miles McEnery Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of works by James Siena, on view 30 October through 20 December 2025 at 511 West 22nd Street. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication featuring an essay by Geoffrey Young.

Before the “dot com” boom of the mid-90s made code a cultural cornerstone, Siena was already exploring the aesthetics of computational logic. By giving form to the concepts of artificial intelligence and data transmission, he was an early voice in the nascent intersection between art and code.

To articulate these concepts, Siena developed a distinctive approach, employing self-imposed rulesets to govern his mark making; these systems, often referred to as “visual algorithms,” function as constraints to guide his hand through intricate, labyrinthine pattern-making. Sinewy lines conjoin only to split off in fractal directions, while his marks oscillate between figure and ground until the eye settles at a contested homeostasis. Yet, Siena’s technique avoids any sense of mechanistic rigidity. As he embraces the inevitability of human deviation, each disruption in his hand-drawn code is generative, and small mutations cascade across the surface in a feedback loop of chaotic logic.

Siena’s paintings seamlessly illustrate otherwise opaque technological concepts—systems and functions the result of millennia of human ingenuity, whose complexities are glazed over and reduced to a steady hum of background noise in our everyday lives. As we enter into an age of artificial intelligence, an uncharted terrain whose ramifications are beyond our immediate grasp, Siena’s works may be more relevant now than ever. As Geoffrey Young notes, “just as new paintings can influence the past, Siena’s new works most assuredly alter the future.”

James Siena (b. 1957 in Oceanside, CA) received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. For over two decades, the artist has taught at New York’s School of Visual Arts in the Masters of Fine Arts department. He is a board member of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum Advisory Council at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. In 2021, Siena was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York, NY.

Siena’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Baronian, Brussels, Belgium; Dieu Donné, New York, NY; Galerie Xippas, Paris, France; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Pace Gallery, New York, NY; Pace Prints, New York, NY; Pierogi 2000, Brooklyn, NY; The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; Ratio 3, San Francisco, CA; and the University Art Museum, University of Albany, Albany, NY; among others.

The artist has participated in group exhibitions at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and elsewhere.

His work is in numerous institutional collections including the British Museum, London, United Kingdom; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

The artist lives and works in New York, NY and Otis, MA.

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Selected Works

Press Release