Seth Koen is originally from Maine. He received his BA from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA. He has shown widely in the U.S., including a recent solo show with Jeff Bailey Gallery in Hudson, New York and shows in the San Francisco Bay Area at The Lab, Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery, Richmond Art Center, Rena Bransten Gallery, Headlands Center for the Arts, and San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery; as well as B. Sakata Garo, Sacramento; Western Colorado Center for the Arts, Grand Junction; Chela, Baltimore; and Hafemann Gallery, Wiesbaden, Germany. Koen has been featured in Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, The New York Times, Artweek, and American Craft. He has been the recipient of the Kala Art Institute Fellowship, Cadogan and Trefethen Fellowships, and the Jay Defeo Prize. He currently lives and works in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

Koen's practice includes commonplace materials such as yarn, thread, and needle in permutations that are at once unexpected and deceptively simple. His maple and basswood sculptures, which at times incorporate crocheted thread, utilize monochromatic combinations of balls, loops, lines, and other basic shapes and forms to suggest the rudimentary building blocks of children's toys. With restraint and subtlety, Koen's ambiguous forms defy utility and encourage novel spatial readings. He maintains an interest in sculptural line and the contrast and interplay between mass and line, much as a limb relates to a tree or a human body.