Elaine Reichek

Elaine Reichek, 2001 Artist-in-Residence, is the tenth artist to create an artwork for the Museum’s façade. Ever Yours, Henry James, the artist’s first large-scale public art piece, is composed of fragments from the great American novelist’s letters to his friend Isabella Stewart Gardner. Reichek was intrigued by the many different ways James closed his letters to Gardner – from the somewhat formal “with many good wishes, Very truly Yours” to the affectionate “always constantly.” These closings indicate something of the depth of genuine feeling in Gardner’s and James’s long friendship. Reichek adds, “By making use of the older 19th-century private epistolary mode for a public contemporary art piece I wanted to cross the literal passage between the old and the new, connect contemporary art with the older collection, and by doing this perhaps mirror Mrs. Gardner’s own non-hierarchical, non-linear methods for the display of her collection.”

Elaine Reichek is a conceptual artist whose work examines preconceptions about aesthetics and culture. Inspired by hand-embroidered samplers, she explores the nature of women’s work and role of craft traditions in contemporary art. Reichek has exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally for nearly forty years. She received her BFA from Yale University and her BA from Brooklyn College. She lives and works in New York.