Susan Silas had her first solo exhibition at fiction/nonfiction in New York City in 1990. In 1998, Silas retraced the steps of a 1945 death march. This project, Helmbrechts walk, 1998-2003, has been shown at The Koffler Gallery in Toronto, Hebrew Union College Museum in New York City, Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim in Germany, Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, and the Center for Contemporary Art in Slovenia. Helmbrechts walk is the subject of chapters in both Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory by Brett Ashley Kaplan and Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing by Dora Apel. Her most recent work on the Shoah is a six-channel video installation: Treblinka Song and The Happy Wanderer. Her current work looks at the middle-aged female face and body in photographs, plaster casts, and in an ongoing diary: love in the ruins; sex over 50. Her work has been featured in Anti-Utopias, Camera Austria, Fotómúvészet, and Artnet Magazine, and reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, the Village Voice, and The New Yorker. She is an essayist, a regular contributor to Hyperallergic, and co-editor of the artblog MOMMY. Silas has been awarded fellowships at Everglades National Park, MacDowell, The Corporation of Yaddo, VCCA, and Ucross Foundation. Silas received her MFA at California Institute of the Arts. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Susan Silas
Studios
Nef
Susan Silas worked in the Nef studio.
Nef Studio, the first entirely new studio built after 1937, was donated by esteemed photographer, explorer, author, and MacDowell Fellow Evelyn Steffanson Nef in 1992. Endowed funds for the studio’s maintenance in perpetuity and an annual Fellowship for photographers were given in addition to funds for construction. Mrs. Nef said she had known about MacDowell all her…