Allegory — 1989–1995
Allegory is a body of twelve large-scale works developed through painting, drawing, and language. The series emerged from an inquiry into freedom, image formation, and the threshold between an image apprehended inwardly and its realization in material form.
The paintings developed through an increasingly concentrated studio process in which forms appeared less as inventions than as presences pressing toward actualization. Image, energy, rhythm, and matter continually act upon one another, moving between fragmentation and wholeness, darkness and illumination, descent and ascent.
The final work in the series, Castle in the Air, takes language as its material. Written from the same impulse as the paintings, it follows an image that seems to precede its physical realization—an image sensed before it can be fully seen, named, or fixed. Together, these works establish a line of inquiry that later extends into writing, moving image, and the shaping of cultural systems.
West Chelsea — 1995–Present
In 1995, Sirois began organizing the movement of galleries into West Chelsea, extending her practice beyond the studio and approaching galleries, buildings, adjacency, movement, and the city itself as artistic material.
Through The Chelsea West Real Estate Review, a fax broadcast she created and circulated to selected galleries, Sirois began organizing a network of dealers whose proximity to one another could generate the critical mass required for a new cultural district.
What developed was not simply a sequence of relocations, but a spatial composition: a concentration of galleries capable of shifting the center of the contemporary art world in New York.
This work has continued for three decades as West Chelsea moved from formation and consolidation into sustained development pressure and cultural attrition. Over time, Sirois’s focus expanded from creating the conditions for a district to take hold to the structures that determine whether cultural life can remain in place.
529 West 20th Street / 529 Arts — 1995–2025
At 529 West 20th Street, the proposition for West Chelsea took architectural form. Sirois conceived the vacant warehouse as a vertical concentration of galleries and assembled the group whose proximity could give the emerging district critical mass. Within eighteen months, twenty-two galleries occupied the building, making 529 a defining center in the formation of Chelsea’s gallery district.
More recently, in collaboration with Eagle Point Properties, the building’s ownership, Sirois conceived The Curator Lab, The Private Lounge, and The Viewing Room as interconnected elements of a cultural habitat shaped for the way art professionals work today.
Rather than reproducing the conventional gallery model, the three spaces are conceived as distinct but porous environments in which exhibition, research, presentation, conversation, hospitality, and exchange can overlap. The Curator Lab provides a framework for exhibitions and curatorial projects; The Private Lounge creates a setting for work, meeting, and informal exchange; and The Viewing Room, currently in development, extends these functions into more focused forms of presentation and encounter.
Together, they propose a contemporary cultural environment in which curators, gallerists, artists, writers, collectors, and other art professionals can move between making, presenting, thinking, and gathering within a shared ecology.
Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts — 1998
In 1998, Sirois identified and negotiated the acquisition of 323 West 39th Street as a permanent home for the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. She assembled the legal, financial, and cultural participants needed to structure the transaction as a gift-purchase, allowing the seller to reduce the sale price while receiving a corresponding charitable tax deduction.
The acquisition gave EFA a permanent base for artistic production. The twelve-story building now contains approximately 90 subsidized working artist studios, making EFA the largest subsidized artist studio organization in Manhattan, alongside exhibition and program spaces and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.
The project introduced another dimension to Sirois’s evolving practice: ownership as a cultural form—a means of giving artistic production duration, stability, and the possibility of remaining in the city.
High Line — 2003
In 2003, Sirois was invited by Joshua David and Robert Hammond, founders of Friends of the High Line, to testify at a pivotal federal Surface Transportation Board hearing on the future of the elevated railway. She spoke on behalf of Chelsea Village Business Owners, representing more than 200 businesses surrounding the High Line in West Chelsea and the Meatpacking District. The group was composed largely of contemporary art galleries, but also included cultural institutions such as The Kitchen and Creative Time.
The hearing took place within a federal abandonment proceeding that had begun in 1989. Although abandonment had been authorized in 1992, the structure remained standing, and by 2003 two competing futures were before the Board: demolition, still sought by the Chelsea Property Owners, or preservation through federal railbanking, which would allow the corridor to be retained intact and converted to public use.
Drawing on her role in the formation of West Chelsea, Sirois described a district that had grown from only a handful of galleries in 1995 to more than 175 by 2003. She argued that its development was not finished, and that the High Line could become the defining public structure through which the district was experienced—drawing people into its galleries and extending its cultural life. The collective presence of this unusually dense art community brought substantial cultural and economic weight to the case for preservation.
In 2005, the Surface Transportation Board issued the Certificate of Interim Trail Use, replacing the path toward demolition with federal railbanking and opening the way for the High Line’s transformation into public space.
The John Weber Interviews — 2004
In 2004, Sirois conceived, filmed, and edited a series of conversations with art dealer John Weber (1932–2008), whose career placed him at the center of major transformations in contemporary art from the 1960s onward.
Moving between personal recollection and art-world history, the interviews address the emergence of SoHo; the changing role and philosophy of the gallery; artists and collectors; the art world of the 1970s; and Weber’s encounters with figures including Dan Flavin. They extend into Minimalism, Earthworks, Conceptual practice, the international circulation of artists and ideas, and the changing relationships among artists, dealers, collectors, institutions, and the city.
Conceived as primary oral and filmed texts, the interviews preserve the perspective of a participant whose career moved through the Martha Jackson Gallery and Dwan Gallery before the opening of the John Weber Gallery at 420 West Broadway, one of the formative sites of the SoHo art world. The interviews are available online, with material from the series indexed in the Frick Art Research Library’s Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America.
Art vs. Gentrification — 2009 / 2011
Art vs. Gentrification brought archival images, maps, data, and spatial analysis into a projected visual composition examining the forces through which cultural districts form, gain visibility, and become vulnerable to displacement.
The first version was presented in 2009 at SALA 02, a salon organized by architects Carl Stein, Tom Abraham, and John Barboni of Elemental Architecture LLC, to an audience of artists, architects, and urban practitioners.
An expanded version developed in 2011 remained unpresented.
The work marks an important transition in Sirois’s practice: the city is no longer only a site of intervention, but also a subject to be composed through image, evidence, sequence, and time. Methods first developed here later became part of Montmartre / SoHo / Chelsea.
Guided by Invoices — 2011–2013
Founded and directed by Sirois in West Chelsea, Guided by Invoices was conceived as a collaborative environment where artists, curators, and critics intersected, shaping the development of exhibitions and the work itself.
The program brought together painting, sculpture, language, mathematics, film, performance, sound, and politically engaged practices. Sirois worked closely with artists including Cora Cohen, whose exhibition The Responsibility of Forms considered the instability and physical intelligence of abstraction; Carol Szymanski, whose projects Pissin’ Against the Wind and CoCKSHuT DUMMY moved between sculpture, language, performance, and the social codes embedded in speech; and Erik and Martin Demaine, whose Curved Crease Sculptures brought mathematics, paper, and sculptural form into a single field of inquiry. AgitPOP, curated by Anthony Haden-Guest, extended the program into explicitly political and cultural territory.
In 2012, Guided by Invoices collaborated with AGAC and the Québec Government Office in New York on Under the Radar: The New Visionaries, presenting work by nine Québec-based artists during Armory Show VIP Week. The project placed emerging practices from Québec into direct contact with the New York art world, using the gallery not simply as an exhibition site but as a point of cultural exchange.
A particularly collaborative curatorial project was Transformations (2011–2012), in which Ondrej Rudavsky’s hybrid practice across experimental film, animation, projection, painting, and sculpture served as a generative point of departure for a sequence of artistic interventions. His films, including Celestial Riddle, Circus 2, Mandala, Moon, and Strangers, established the initial visual field from which the project developed.
The collaboration with French neosoprano and performance artist Nicole Renaud unfolded within Rudavsky’s projected image-world. Conceived in three movements as a single composition, Renaud entered the imagery itself, inhabiting the identity of one of Rudavsky’s figures and reconstituting it through voice, music, gesture, bodily presence, and her transparent accordion into a distinct performative work.
William Rahilly, whose practice moves across video, performance, photography, sound, and installation, then took Renaud’s composition within Rudavsky’s work as material for Transformations (2012), a looping video that translated the encounter into another artistic language. Rudavsky’s image generated Renaud’s performative composition; Renaud’s composition generated Rahilly’s moving image. The exhibition unfolded recursively, each work becoming material for the next.
Guided by Invoices extended a conception of artistic practice already present in Sirois’s work, one in which the shaping of places, relationships, institutions, and cultural formations could itself constitute artistic form. The gallery functioned as a medium through which artists, works, ideas, and audiences could be brought into productive relation. Exhibition-making was one expression of a broader practice in which social, spatial, and cultural structures are themselves treated as material.
Westbeth Cultural Space Development Plan — 2016
For Westbeth Home to the Arts, Sirois developed a comprehensive plan for all of the complex’s commercial spaces, conceiving its street-level and upper-floor areas as a continuous public cultural environment. The proposal brought together approximately twenty complementary uses—including galleries, bookstores, artist-supply stores, exhibition spaces, and a café—within a larger spatial framework encompassing circulation, public space, outdoor areas, and potential new uses throughout the complex.
Rather than treating the spaces as independent tenancies, the proposal conceived them as an interconnected cultural ecosystem, in which individual uses could reinforce one another and extend Westbeth’s artistic life into the surrounding neighborhood. The master plan was conceived over a 50-year horizon, integrating spatial organization, cultural use, and long-term economic sustainability.
The proposal was developed for Westbeth but was not implemented.
Four Degrees of Abstraction — 2018
At Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in 2018, Four Degrees of Abstraction brought together Cora Cohen, Morgan Everhart, Suzanne Olivier, and Xiaofu Wang, four painters whose work occupied different positions between abstraction and recognizable form. The exhibition began from a question already present in Sirois's earlier work with Cora Cohen: how could environment and the living world enter abstraction — as material, as structure, as pressure on form — without abstraction becoming representation?
For Cohen, abstraction remained inseparable from lived experience. Her work draws on the layered presence of culture within nature — the architecture of Insel Hombroich in Germany, the constant, unplanned energy moving through cities — entering the painting without becoming representation. Her position provided one end of the exhibition's argument: abstraction could remain fully abstract while allowing experience, perception, and the external world to act upon its form.
Suzanne Olivier, a Québec painter formed in the wake of the Automatiste movement, Paul-Émile Borduas, and Refus global, approached the question differently. Spontaneous gesture remained fundamental to her painting, but as her research intensified, the natural world gradually entered that language, producing what she has called "imaginary landscapes, detached from both tradition and representation." Her work brought into the exhibition a distinctly Québec history of abstraction — one in which gesture was bound not only to formal freedom but to a larger cultural and philosophical idea of liberation.
For Morgan Everhart, environment entered by the most direct route: a living form, cut and placed before her. Her floral paintings emerged directly from an abstract practice: while struggling with a large abstraction that read like an aerial view, she was challenged by a painter friend who brought a bouquet into her studio, and found the act of painting it at once cathartic, personal, and universal. Flowers did not return the painting to conventional representation; they became another means through which abstraction, observation, memory, and feeling could occupy the same field.
Xiaofu Wang, born in Wuhan and trained first at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, introduced yet another relationship between image and environment. Her painting Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon takes its title from Ang Lee's film, and from its bamboo-forest fight scene in particular: a fighter's strength lies not in opposing the bamboo but in moving with its resistance. Wang built the painting on that same principle, translating an observed and cinematic encounter with the natural world into rhythm, force, movement, and pictorial structure.
Read together, the four positions treated environment not as subject matter but as a formal pressure acting on abstraction from the inside, complicating the hierarchy inherited from Clement Greenberg, in which "pure" abstraction was privileged precisely to the extent that reference, narrative, emotion, individuality, and recognizable experience were excluded. Four Degrees of Abstraction framed abstraction as a continuum: Cohen allowing the world to enter abstraction without representation; Olivier transforming nature through gesture into imaginary landscape; Everhart admitting recognizable flora into that same field; and Wang translating an observed, cinematic encounter with the living world into the structural language of painting.
Jack Shainman Gallery / The Hall — 2022–2025
In 2022, Sirois identified and proposed the former Banking Hall of the Clock Tower Building at 46 Lafayette Street and negotiated its acquisition for Jack Shainman Gallery. Built in the late nineteenth century for the New York Life Insurance Company, the landmarked interior carries an architectural and institutional history inseparable from the histories of American finance and power. New York Life's predecessor, the Nautilus Insurance Company, had also issued policies insuring enslaved people as property, an earlier history that gave the grandeur of the space a more complicated resonance.
For Jack Shainman and his partner, artist Carlos Vega, the project shifted the question from the geography of galleries to the architecture of exhibition itself. It asked whether contemporary art could be presented effectively in a space that refused the neutrality of the white cube, and, more importantly, whether that architectural and historical charge could become a generative condition rather than a compromise. Here, the opposite of neutrality became a component of the form: an exhibition space whose architecture and history could actively enter into the experience of the work. The architecture itself became a medium.
The proposition developed collaboratively, first through ongoing discussion and then through direct encounters between the still-unfinished Banking Hall and artists represented by the gallery. One of the earliest came when Nick Cave was invited into the raw space; his response was immediate, and the architecture itself became part of the thinking around the inaugural exhibition. For Amalgams and Graphts, staged once the hall was complete, Cave placed Amalgam (Origin), a nearly twenty-six-foot bronze figure cast from his own body, at its center. Conceived as a contemporary monument, the work occupied a position traditionally reserved for figures of institutional and civic power, recasting the monumental language of the room through the presence of a Black artist whose work engages race, violence, memory, beauty, and resilience.
Wolff Portfolio Cultural Stewardship Proposal — 2025
When the Wolff Portfolio in West Chelsea was placed on the market in December 2024, first reported by Commercial Observer on December 16 with expectations it could fetch up to $170 million, the future of its approximately 200 artist studios, galleries, and related cultural uses was suddenly at risk. Sirois initiated and led an effort to preserve the community that had developed there over three decades. She brought together the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and Eagle Point Properties, structuring a proposal in which nonprofit cultural stewardship could operate at the scale of a major real-estate acquisition. The resulting offer placed nonprofit ownership at the center of the transaction, with private-sector capital and operating expertise supporting the long-term continuity of the building’s cultural use.
The intervention began from a different reading of the property itself. What the offering materials presented as below-market rents and unrealized financial upside could also be understood as the conditions that had allowed an unusually dense artistic community to remain intact. The building was approximately 95 percent occupied, debt-free, and economically productive. Its significance lay not simply in containing artists and galleries, but in the accumulated relationships, working conditions, and continuity that made it function as a cultural ecosystem rather than a collection of individual tenancies.
As the acquisition structure developed, the project exposed a more fundamental obstacle. Under the private-business-use rules governing the tax-exempt 501(c)(3) financing being considered, no more than five percent of the bond-financed project could be devoted to private business use. Yet leases to individual artists and art galleries would themselves be classified as private business use, even if the building were owned by a nonprofit and their occupancy formally aligned with its cultural mission.
Because those uses constituted nearly the entire building, the financing structure was effectively disqualified. Within the structure under consideration, institutional cultural uses such as museums and concert halls could qualify for tax-exempt financing, while artist studios and art galleries were treated as private business use and therefore did not receive the same financing advantages. Yet artists and galleries are themselves producers of culture, not merely occupants of cultural space. What emerged was not simply a financing problem, but a category-of-use problem: a gap between the building’s actual cultural function and the legal and financial categories through which that function was recognized.
The proposal received formal support from Council Member Erik Bottcher, U.S. Representative Jerrold Nadler, Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, and Assembly Member Tony Simone. In a letter to the Naftali Foundation, they endorsed the partnership of EFA, Eagle Point Properties, and Art State, identified the building as Manhattan’s largest concentration of artist workspaces under one roof, and argued for its preservation as cultural infrastructure. The estate did not respond to the acquisition proposal, and the property’s future remained unresolved.
Montmartre / SoHo / Chelsea — 2025–Present
Montmartre / SoHo / Chelsea is an artwork in progress that takes two interlocking forms: a time-based film composed through archival photographs, paintings, drawings, text, sound, and silence, and a manual titled The Category of Use. The work proceeds from the proposition that cultural districts are not natural formations but composed ones, shaped by decisions and therefore capable of being approached and shaped as art forms.
The film unfolds through three sequences, Montmartre, SoHo, and Chelsea, each developing through image, duration, music, and text. The viewer moves through the formation, vitality, and dissolution of each district, drawn into the beauty and particular character that held each period together. What becomes perceptible is not only what happened, but what was possible: how these territories might have held, and what the city might be today had the conditions been different. The Montmartre sequence is currently the most advanced; SoHo and Chelsea remain in development.
The Category of Use works from the same field through language and structure. It identifies the decisions, classifications, and forms of governance that determine whether cultural districts form, endure, or disappear, drawing on Sirois’s direct involvement in Chelsea and on the Wolff Portfolio as a lived case. The film makes these conditions perceptible; the manual gives them structural form. Together they constitute a single artwork, moving between perception and action, image and governance.