Susan Silas

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Susan Silas is a visual artist and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BA in history from Reed College and her Masters in Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts. Silas is a dual American and Hungarian national who has built a diverse career as an artist during the past two decades. After completing her graduate studies in 1983, she moved from Los Angeles back to New York. Soon afterwards, she began exhibiting her work in many group exhibitions including at: 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 her first solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie Antoine Candau.

For the past decade her work has focused on the 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. In November of 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. Other recent works include a four screen video installation of the four death camps in 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.

Silas has written featured articles for the online magazine ArtNet, has been exhibiting her work in the US and in Europe since 1985, and has taught at New York University and Cooper Union.

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