Sidney Gordin

Sidney Gordin was born in Chelyabinsk, Russia in 1918 and he spent his early years in Shanghai, China. At the age of four, he moved with his family to New York. Gordin studied in his early years at Brooklyn Technical High School, he briefly contemplated the idea of becoming an architect. Later, Gordin enrolled at Cooper Union, he was determined to become a professional artist. At Cooper Union, he studied under Morris Kantor and Leo Katz, devoting much of his class schedule to drawing and painting. In 1949, Gordin turned his attention to sculpture for the first time. Three years later, he held his first solo-exhibition at Bennington College in Vermont and the Peter Cooper Gallery in New York. That same year he was accepted into the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s group exhibition American Sculpture. His metal and wire constructions were shown alongside such sculptors as Alexander Calder, William Zorach, and George Rickey. Over the following years, he regularly exhibited in the annual exhibitions of the Whitney Museum of American Art, while also holding yearly solo exhibitions at the Grace Borgenicht Gallery. Gordin also had teaching positions at Sarah Lawrence College, New School for Social Research in New York, and Gordin accepted a position at UC Berkeley’s Department of Art in 1958. Amidst the emerging Bay Area art scene, Gordin taught alongside such artists as Peter Voulkos, Joan Brown, and Jay DeFeo. Coinciding with his move to Berkeley, he held his first solo-exhibition on the West Coast at San Francisco’s seminal Dilexi Gallery. Gordin’s works have been exhibited at the Guggenheim, MoMA, Whitney, Smithsonian, Metropolitan, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and National Academy of Design.