In her capacity as an associate professor at The Ohio State University, Suzanne Silver teaches painting and drawing.
But if you took a comprehensive look at her work, you’d be as likely to come upon a painting or drawing as a massive multimedia installation or elaborate art book.
Silver’s undergraduate degree in art is from Smith College in Northampton, Mass. She also studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris before earning her master of fine arts degree from OSU.
The Clintonville resident spent some time as a visiting artist at OSU before becoming a regular faculty member nine years ago.
“Before I was a professor, I worked as a scenic artist painting sets for theater and film,” she says.
Silver’s interest in art goes back to her childhood in New York, when her parents made a point of taking her to museums. She has been drawing and working with materials since she was little.
“It was part of the culture I grew up in, and I just gravitated toward that,” she says.
Though most of her work these days consists of mixed media and installations, she traces that art form back to her interest in drawing: Both art forms inform her use of space and materials.
“When I draw, I’m interested in lines on paper, and (because) my work is often language-based, lines of text,” Silver says. “I use three-dimensional materials,
but I still consider myself making lines in space.”
Though Silver sometimes uses standard materials such as canvas, she has also worked with powdered pigments, spices, rubber and gold leaf, among other media. She’s also recently been getting into video.
Silver also has an appreciation for language and tries to work it into her art whenever she can – words on canvas, visual puns, etc. That interest has also stoked her pursuit of art books as a preferred medium.
In art books, narrative is generated through superimposed layers and not always through text. Some artists repurpose discarded books through collages; some use unconventional space; some even create unusual structures, such as a book that can be read from front to back or back to front. Silver has used abstract images and interesting fonts, among other things.
Silver’s art books include Blacklists/Whitelists, published by Logan Elm Press at OSU. The book is hand-bound on painted vinyl and wrapped in clear polyester, and consists of blind-embossed, die-cut white-on-white and black-on-black pages.
Silver’s work has been on display at locations from the Columbus Museum of Art and the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati to David Yellin College in
Jerusalem and the Castle of Otranto in Italy. She has received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council and a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Greater Columbus Arts Council.
Though Silver is not currently part of any local exhibitions – until November, she had a show at the Center for Ongoing Research & Projects in Grandview Heights titled Ludic Interventions, including a video and an illuminated neon chair – some of her work can be found in OSU’s Avant-Writing Collection.
Garth Bishop is managing editor. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.
