Seth Siegelaub

Seth Siegelaub (26 September 1941, Bronx, New York - 15 June 2013, Basel) was an American-born art dealer, curator, author and researcher.

Siegelaub ran his own gallery, Seth Siegelaub Contemporary Art in Manhattan from 1964 to 1966. As an independent curator, he played a vital role in the emergence of Conceptual art between 1966 and 1972, working with artists such as Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner. Among his groundbreaking projects were The Xerox Book (1968) and July/August Exhibition (1970), which explored the phenomenon of the “group exhibition” in its most radical form: a book or a journal. In 1972, he turned away from the New York art scene and moved to Paris, where he worked as a publisher. Siegelaub began collecting and researching textiles and books about textiles in the early 1980s. He moved to Amsterdam and founded the Center for Social Research on Old Textiles, which conducts research into the social history of textiles. At the turn of the 21st century he started the Stichting Egress Foundation in Amsterdam to bring together his varied range of projects: contemporary art, textile history, and time and causality research.

Publications

• editor, with John W. Wendler, Xerox Book, New York, 1968, 190 pp. (English)
• January 5-31, 1969, New York: Seth Siegelaub, 1969. Works by Barry, Huebler, Kosuth, Weiner. (English)
• editor, March 1969, 1969. (English)
• Catalogue for the Exhibition, 1969.
• editor, July, August, September 1969. Juillet, Août, Septembre 1969. Juli, August, September 1969, 1969, 26 pp. An exhibition for which eleven artists made work at eleven separate geographical locations; the catalogue provided the last location and a description of the work; with Andre, Barry, Buren, Dibbets, Huebler, Kosuth, LeWitt, Long, N.E. Thing Co. Ltd., Smithson, and Weiner. (English),(French),(German)
• editor, July/August Exhibition. Juillet/Août Exposition. Juli/August Ausstellung, London: Studio International, 1970, 48 pp. Special issue of magazine. [1] (English)/(French)/(German)
• 18 PARIS IV.70, 1970.
• The United States Servicemen’s Fund Art Collection, 1971.
• with Robert Projansky, The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer And Sale Agreement, 1971.
• editor, with Armand Mattelart, Communication and Class Struggle, 1: Capitalism, Imperialism, New York: International General, and Bagnolet: International Mass Media Research Center (IMMRC), 1979, 445 pp.
• editor, with Armand Mattelart, Communication and Class Struggle, 2: Liberation, Socialism, New York: International General, and Bagnolet: International Mass Media Research Center (IMMRC), 1983, 438 pp.

Literature

• Diana Kaur, Seth Siegelaub’s manifesto: A discourse analysis of The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, Södertörns högskola , 2015, 87 pp. Master's thesis.
• Sara Martinetti, "Seth Siegelaub (1941-2013)", Amsterdam, 2013.

Links

• http://egressfoundation.net/
• Chronology, PDF
• http://www.ravenrow.org/exhibition/the_stuff_that_matters/
• https://socialhistory.org/en/collections/seth-siegelaub-collector-and-father-conceptual-art
• Online companion to 2013 exhibition at MoMA
• http://www.stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/seth-siegelaub-beyond-conceptual-art