Sienna Reid’s sense of pain linked to social justice came to her at age five, when she saw an image on the news of a young girl running and screaming as her naked body was covered with burning napalm. Shortly after she had a fever dream in which she alone was responsible for the suffering of all people on the planet. She had this dream repeatedly, until she realized that the only way to let out the pain that she felt witnessing injustice, was to purposefully create art.
Reid’s art spotlights historic and contemporary scapegoating, and how shaming and character assassination are used to destroy the individual and collective history of women, their intellectual property and their bodily autonomy. She is particularly focused on how words and images have been employed throughout history, to harm and create false narratives with regards to female and LGBTQ+ identity.
Reid uses a wide-ranging multimedia approach in her art incorporating painting, drawing, video, photography, sculpture, engraving, woodworking, ceramics, sound and experimental processes to explore her chosen subjects.
Reid says that one of her greatest accomplishments is her award winning film, Sticks and Stones Trilogy, which received the Eureka Film Festival Human Rights Award. “Since I had no idea how to make a film, I did everything backwards, but with the passion and collaboration of an international group of brilliant people, was able to materialize my vision”. Sound is elemental in her films and installations. Reid uses her own recordings and has collaborated with sound artist and musician Marcel Andre’ Reid-Jaques on many projects.
Born and raised in the small Victorian town of Port Townsend in the Pacific Northwest, Reid graduated from the University of Washington with a BFA in painting and Art History. She has lived in Seattle, Denver, San Miguel de Allende, and in Rome from 1999-2013. She moved to NYC in 2013 to open an exhibition space and studio in Bushwick. Since 2017, Reid has been living and creating with her husband and their two rescued tuxedo kittens in a turn of the century house, with a renovated deer slaughtering barn converted into her studio. Reid’s art is held in private collections throughout the United States and Europe.
