After graduation Siena stayed in Ithaca for a couple of years before moving to New York; for years, he supported himself by making museum-quality picture frames. He rented his first studio in 1984, a dirt-floor basement under a hair salon on the Lower East Side—"$100 a month, and worth it too." With his first wife, he formed a performance art group that made a name for itself in the downtown scene, eventually getting tapped to do some short pieces for HBO and Cinemax. "It had a time-based element—it could be repeated and rehearsed—but it was not narrative by any means," he says. "One guy used to call us 'dancing poets' because we would create word clusters and there would be movements either opposing or enhancing the words." He retired from performance when his son (now twenty) was born; with his own art, his day job making frames, and now parenting, something had to go. "I spent a lot of time doing child rearing, because we were very broke," he says. "But I never resented the fact that I made a living by other means, never felt that it was somehow unfair; that's the way it is for most artists. It was a good sixteen or seventeen years of doing other things. I was selling a little, but not enough to survive."
His first solo show in New York came in 1996 at a gallery in Brooklyn, with one in Manhattan the following year. He now has the luxury of focusing exclusively on his art; he and his second wife, French-born artist Katia Santibañez, live on Broome Street on the Lower East Side and each keep studios nearby. They split their time between the city and a 200-year-old house in a tiny village in the Massachusetts Berkshires. "It felt amazing, like I was being given the longest, best vacation ever, and I'm still on it," Siena says of being a full-time artist. "But now I work much harder than ever. Katia's also very disciplined; we talk during the day about when to have dinner, and sometimes it's eight or eight-thirty, because we have so much to do. We spend more time in our studios than anywhere else."
Siena's most recent solo show, at PaceWildenstein in 2008, featured not only his familiar algorithmic paintings but also some different work—moody, almost malevolent drawings of old men as well as gouaches with sexual themes, such as A Boy Surrounded by His Penis. (As a New York Sun reviewer put it in a rave: "This rule-fiend seems intent on breaking his own cardinal principles.") Lately, he's been working on images of distorted bodies, inspired in part by medieval depictions of devils. "There are times when it isn't necessarily fun, and I feel kind of guilty when it isn't," he says of the artist's life. "It should be fun; I should be overjoyed that this is all I have to do now. It's the old concept of, 'be careful what you wish for.'"
