The Turkish Bath

Born in Wales and trained at the Brighton School of Art in Sussex, England, Sylvia Sleigh moved to New York in 1962, with her husband, art critic and curator Lawrence Alloway. There Sleigh exhibited in commercial galleries as well as alternative spaces such as the women’s cooperative galleries SoHo 20 and A.I.R Gallery. Experiences in Sleigh’s youth and her struggles as a female artist in the 1930s and ’40s incited her to examine gender discrimination and the importance of feminism, which guided her art for the rest of her life. As a portraitist, she sought to portray the individuality of her subjects through careful, sustained observation and interaction during the posing process. Throughout her career, she held teaching positions at several prestigious schools including Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois; the New School for Social Research in New York; and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Sleigh’s work has been featured in recent exhibitions including Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution (which began at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and toured from 2007 to 2009) and Ingres and the Moderns at the Musée national des Beaux-Arts, Quebec, where The Turkish Bath was shown alongside Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres’s (1780–1867) work of the same name.

http://vimeo.com/25438978">Sylvia Sleigh: The Turkish Bath from http://vimeo.com/smartmuseum">Smart Museum of Art on http://vimeo.com">Vimeo.>