Elyse Speaks

Biography

Elyse Speaks’ research and writing focus on the history of modern and contemporary sculpture and installation. Her work focuses on the intersection of sculpture, materiality, gender, and race in art from the 1960s to today, particularly through the lens of forms of making often considered to be ‘amateur,’ blue-collar, or craft-based. She is also interested in questions of ethics, aesthetics, and art, social practice, participatory art, and other non-medium specific forms of engagement with the public. Currently she is researching the intersection of fiber-based practices, traditional craft practices, and metal sculpture within the work of artists in the 1970s and 1980s such as Lee Bontecou, Maren Hassinger, and Barbara Chase-Riboud. She currently teaches art history at the University of Notre Dame and has published essays in anthologies and journals including Arts, American Art, Art Journal, The Journal of Modern Craft, The Sculpture Journal, and Women’s Studies.

Her forthcoming book is titled Women, Making, and Everyday Value in Contemporary Installation Art: Stockholder, Lou, and Sze (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2025). This study considers the role of alternative processes and materials in installations made in the 1990s. It undertakes a close consideration of the early work of Jessica Stockholder, Liza Lou, and Sarah Sze, and looks across their very different practices with an eye toward offering a sustained analysis of artwork that situates itself between media (between painting and sculpture, or art and craft). Examining Stockholder, Lou, and Sze together highlights the capacity for artwork to promote alternate categories of aesthetic experience through investigations of non-aesthetic materials and processes. Each of the artists under consideration here advances the legacies of feminist art but draws less upon stereotypically feminine forms of labor than on generic forms of (hand) work that lack a traditional artistic framework. New approaches to sculptural making that use deprofessionalized methods and materials aim to emphasize connections between the mundane and surprising, the banal and transformed, and the real and imaginary. These connections are explored in the service of an investigation of value—value not as exclusively tied to medium, but as tied to what art can offer as it extends beyond aesthetic categories and their boundaries.