Elana Herzog

Elana Herzog is an American installation artist and sculptor based in New York City. She is most known for abstract, tactile works in which she disassembles, reconfigures and embeds second-hand textiles in walls, modular panels and architectural spaces with industrial-grade metal staples.^[1][2] Herzog has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, among others.^[3][4][5] She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Tang Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Sharjah Art Museum, and Reykjavik Art Museum.^{[6][7][8][9][10]}

Herzog's installations blur distinctions between two-and three-dimensional media, eliciting comparisons to late-modernist painting and drawing, yet they also upend that tradition through a subversive, deconstructive process that emphasizes ephemerality and fragility.^[11][12][13] Artcritical editor David Brody writes of that process: "Herzog's ambitiously scaled compositions are built up from small, provisional decisions—unruly brushstrokes, in effect—that coalesce into powerful storms of texture."^[14] Thematically, Herzog's conversion of household castoffs into minimalist art raises questions about value, ownership and high- and low-culture conventions of taste and beauty;^[15][16][17] Review Magazine describes her work as a "conceptual, emotional, and gutsy" alternative to most fiber art, which leaves viewers to conjecture on associations between women, fiber and gender stereotypes, the destructive capacities of the creative process, and the layering of history.^[18]