Sidney Gordin was born in Chelyabinsk, Russia 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. There, he studied under Morris Kantor (1896-1974) and Leo Katz (1887-1982), 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 1951. His metal and wire constructions were shown alongside such sculptors as Alexander Calder (1898-1976), William Zorach (1887-1966), and George Rickey (1907-2002). 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 in New York. Three days into his first solo-exhibition at Borgenicht in 1953, the Whitney made their first acquisition of his work by purchasing a metal construction for their permanent collection.

By the late 1950s, he began to employ wood in his sculptures, which eventually led to the creation of painted constructions. Gordin also had teaching stints at both Sarah Lawrence College and the New School for Social Research in New York, 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. In 1962, the M.H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco mounted his first one-man museum show.

Gordin maintained his professorship at Berkeley, but Gordin never completely cut his ties to the East Coast where he maintained a studio in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which he often visited. Gordin was inducted as a Member of the National Academy of Design. Gordin is an extremely important artist who is the collection of many connoisseur collectors. Gordin’s works have been in the Guggenheim, MoMA, Whitney, Smithsonian, Metropolitan, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and National Academy of Design.