Susan Silas

Susan Silas is a visual artist and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Silas is a dual American and Hungarian national who has built a diverse career as an artist during the past two decades. Silas has been exhibiting her work in the US and in Europe since 1985, and has taught at New York University and Cooper Union.

Silas received her BA in history from Reed College and her Masters in Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts. After completing her graduate studies in 1983, she moved from Los Angeles back to New York. Soon afterwards, she began exhibiting her work in group exhibitions including: White Columns, New York; New Langton Arts, San Francisco; Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles; Cal Arts: Skeptical Belief(s); The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Girls Night Out; Femininity as Masquerade, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and Bridges and Boundaries The Jewish Museum, New York. In 1990, Silas had her first solo exhibition, at fiction/nonfiction in New York. This exhibition was followed in 1991 by a solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie Antoine Candau.

For the past decade Silas’s work has focused on landscape and memory. In 1997, she began working on Helmbrechts walk, 1998-2003, a project in which she retraced the steps of an historical death march of all women that took place at the close of the Second World War, walking for 22 days and 225 miles in Eastern Europe. This work found several forms: an unbound 48 plate artist book, a video installation and a slide projection. It has been discussed in the chapter on her work in the book Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing by Dora Apel and was the subject of an interview with her for a broadcast on BBC radio and more recently with ArtonAir.org. In November 2005 this work, along with a video installation were the subject of a solo exhibition at the Koffler Gallery in Toronto, accompanied by an essay on her work by the scholar Brett Ashley Kaplan. Helmbrechts walk, 1998-2003 was exhibited at Hebrew Union College Museum in New York City from September 2009 to June 2010 and then traveled in an English/German edition to Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim in Neuenhaus, Germany in the summer of 2010 and to Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna in the fall of that year. In 2011 this work was included in the exhibition Continuity at Center for Contemporary Arts, Celje, Slovenia curated by Irena Cercnik. A fuller consideration of this work was recently published in Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory by Brett Ashley Kaplan. Other recent works include a four screen video installation of the four Nazi death camps in German occupied Poland, Untitled (11–14 May 1998), shown in February, 2001 at the Cooley Memorial Gallery in Portland, Oregon and a sound work on CD exhibited at the Staller Center at Stony Brook. The artist’s most recent work on the Shoah is a six-channel video installation titled Treblinka Song and The Happy Wanderer.

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