Claire Jeanine Satin: Maker of Art Books, Public Art, Sculptor, Designer of ‘Art To Wear Jewelry’

South Florida-based contemporary artist Claire Jeanine Satin is a renowned book artist, sculptor, creator of public art installations and designer of “art jewelry”, with a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from Pratt Institute. She is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist who has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe for over 30 years, her works have been acquired by many museums, private and public collections. Much of her work over the years has been influenced by the ideas of her friend and mentor, John Cage.

John Cage, the late avant-garde composer, philosopher and poet, had a tremendous impact upon Satin’s artistic development. They met in 1979 at Broward Community College, where Satin was teaching in the Art Department. She was fascinated by Cage’s experimental spirit and charming persona. His use of chance operations as “a means of locating a single among a multiplicity of answers” and “freeing the ego from its taste and memory, its concern for profit and power” provided welcome solutions to Satin’s restless experiments of integrating the textual and the visual components of her bookworks. Shortly after meeting Cage, Satin started to create the “Cage-like” bookworks that have subsequently become the hallmark of her oeuvre.

‘Seeing Language’, Bookwork – the concept is based on the four “transmitters”: the head, the hand, the eye and the heart. Evidence of each is visually presented in the book.

“I am always experimentally engaged with my work. In attempting to create alternative visions away from conventional barriers, I am seeking possibilities for reassembling pieces of phenomenal experiences into new and imaginative aesthetic forms in my books, sculpture and related works”, explains the artist. “My idea of a book, and book-related works, are more than a temporal sequence of compartmentalized experiences, whose order is regulated by the finite view of line, page, covers, etc. Rather, the ‘book’ can take on forms that do not involve ordinary ‘reading’ practices such as those found in codices, scrolls, tablets, etc., or ordinary media such as paper, velum, etc. My work becomes a book the instant one recognizes its potential ‘to read’,” explained Ms. Satin.

Art Book: Judaica Hamsa

In the past, the artist has received over 10 important grants and fellowships including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant for Sculpture, an award nomination from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, two Florida Individual Artist Fellowships, and a Richard A. Florsheim Art Fund Grant in support of a traveling exhibition of her work that culminated at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. in 1993. More recently the artist received a Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts Award, the South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual Arts Fellowship of $15,000, and in 2001 a grant from the Memorial Foundation of Jewish Culture to create an artist’s book on The Spirit of the Hebrew Alphabet.

Pentimento Kabbalah Book III (copper)

The late Helen L. Kohen, Art Writer and Former Art Critic of the Miami Herald said of Satin’s work, “Obviously, worship of the book form is nothing new. Authors from Byron to Grass have cherished the dream of the book-as-object: their own object. Claire Jeanine Satin, a South Florida-based artist notable for her bookworks, sculpture and public art works, elevated that reverance to new levels. She invents new shapes for books, pushing to define the look of a page, the role of words, and how people see them. It’s been a life work, a devotion that has led through a great variety of formats, techniques and mediums, down several hundred trails of thought…A true post-modern, Satin deconstructs the notion of the book, never losing sight of its origins, or her own.”

Full of Beauty, 2002. A bookwork exploring the representation of the word “beauty” as text and image, and its variations. The structure of the text remains on the page as well as floats independently off the page, creating a more 3-dimensional form. This piece is one of several of Ms. Satin’s Art Books acquired by the Rare Book Collection of the Library of Congress.

The artist’s works have been acquired by many museums, private and public collections. In the U.S., they are included in the Smithsonian Institution Archives of American Art, Washington D.C.; the Rare Books and Special Collections Department of The Library of Congress in Washington D.C. purchased several of Ms. Satin’s artist books; the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Los Angeles, CA; and the Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

Art Book: People Either Get the Point or They Don’t.

Also Ms. Satin is one of only two artists who have had a solo exhibition of bookworks at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. “Discarding the idea of the book as a linear form with a fixed sequence and narrative, I have chosen a more complex temporal, textual, spatial invention of interdependent meaning-making thought.  Although the physical materiality of the work is as essential as the conceptual material it houses, it is the idea that is ultimately paramount, taking a signal from Plato’s term lexis, my mode of ‘telling’ is to transform and reassemble visual and textual elements into new systems”, explains the artist.

Public Art Installation: The Chapman Chronicles, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska, 1992

In addition to Claire Jeanine Satin’s famed bookworks, the artist is known for her sculpture, public art installations, and ‘Art To Wear Jewelry’ collection. 

Art To Wear Jewelry Collection: Asian Combs Necklace

“I am always seeking possibilities for reassembling ideas of phenomenal, historical or metaphorical experiences into new aesthetic forms”, explained the artist. She has designed costumes and accessories for theatre and cinema, her Film Dress is a classic example of Satin’s versatility and creative strength. 

Claire Jeanine Satin’s acclaimed ‘Film Dress’

The artists works were recently featured in the Genova Show honoring Henry James, once again Italy played host to a multimedia installation by Satin. Presented by Beth Vermeer, the exhibit took place from May 2nd through May 9th, 2016, and was part of a tribute to the legendary author Henry James. The show featured some of Satin’s bookworks, including The Gardens and Waters of Italy, as well as two video installations, The Waters of Venice: Remembering Henry James and Water Veils, both of which were previously shown in Italy. The show took place at Italio Britannica, Piazza della Vittoria, 14/22, 16121, Genova, Italy.

Art Book: IL Giardino Palazzo Capello Soranzo II inside view