Conversations with the artist: ‘Navigating Uncharted Waters’

Navigating Uncharted Waters invites the audience into a revealing dialogue between Mark Seidenfeld and Elise Trucks. The conversation will examine artistic process, influences, historical context, and the philosophical ideas that shape the paintings. This discussion offers an intimate look into a rare space, where contemporary painting, memory, and imagination converge.

Click here to learn more about the exhibition.

About Mark Seidenfeld

Mark Seidenfeld was born in 1954 in New York City. He is an abstract painter whose work investigates structure, gesture, and spatial depth. His practice is defined by a sustained engagement with painting as an evolving process shaped by perception and revision. He lives and works in the Hamptons.

About Elise Trucks

Elise Trucks is an art historian, writer, and cultural strategist based on the East End of Long Island. She holds a Master’s degree in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, where she studied with Mignon Nixon, and completed her undergraduate honors thesis at Columbia University. She is course-complete for a PhD in Art History at SUNY Binghamton.

She has taught art history and writing at SUNY Binghamton, the University of Tampa, and Misericordia University. She has been invited to present her art historical research at venues including the Universities Art Association of Canada at the Banff Centre and the Savannah College of Art and Design. At Guild Hall, she managed the Academy of the Arts and co-produced Art As Ecosystem with Eric Fischl — a series that brought together artists, scientists, and thinkers to examine the conditions that make creative culture possible.

Her catalog and critical writing draws on a long engagement with the history of abstraction, feminist art theory, and the institutional frameworks through which art acquires meaning and endures. She has known Mark Seidenfeld and his work for many years.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​