Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman, Rebecca Sears, lecturer in the Department of Classics in Arts & Sciences; and curator Meredith Malone will discuss Sillman’s animated video After Metamorphoses (2015–16), the artist’s response to the Roman poet Ovid’s mythic tale of transformation, desire, and power. Sillman’s five-minute video will be screened in advance of the Q&A and is available for viewing now.

To join the ZOOM conversation and live Q&A on 10 April at 11 am (CDT) register here

Amy Sillman: Live Online Conversation, Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair

As part of Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair's (PMVABF) 'The Classroom' series, Amy Sillman will be joined in live conversation with Rindon Johnson. Taking Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings of Amy Sillman (After 8 Books, 2020) and Rindon Johnson’s The Law of Large Numbers: Black Sonic Abyss, or I do not walk a line that is thin, straight, or secure (Inpatient Press, 2021) as its starting points, this conversation between Amy Sillman and Rindon Johnson will deal with both artists' writing practices and the central question of form in rethinking art history and aesthetic categories. Presented by After 8 Books.

Saturday, 27 February, 2pm (EST, 7pm GMT)

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Amy Sillman: In Conversation, The Drawing Center, New York

Amy Silllman will be joined in conversation with artist Torkwase Dyson and Chief Curator Claire Gilman as they discuss the present and future of drawing and its ever increasing vitality during this destabilizing, painful, and transformative time. 

The conversation will be held via Zoom. 

Wednesday, 16 December, 6pm (EST; 11pm GMT)

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Amy Sillman: Live Conversation with Michelle Kuo, Museum of Modern Art 

Join Amy Sillman in conversation with Michelle Kuo, the Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, as they talk about the importance of shape, the shape-making outliers of art history, and Sillman’s new zine as part of our Virtual Views initiative. MoMA members are invited to submit questions via the online form.

Thursday, 21 May, 8pm EDT (Friday, 22 May, 1am BST)

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Amy Sillman: Instagram Live Conversation with Michelle Kuo, Museum of Modern Art

Amy Sillman talks with Michelle Kuo, The Marlene Hess Curator of Painting and Sculpture, about the zine she’s created in conjunction with her Artist’s Choice: The Shape of Shape exhibition.

Wednesday 13 May, 12pm EST

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Thomas Dane Gallery at Frieze LA 2020

Drawing(s)
Thomas Dane Gallery 
Stand: C08

Featuring works by: Terry Adkins, Hurvin Anderson, Walead Beshty, Lynda Benglis, Cecily Brown, Anya Gallaccio, Arturo Herrera, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Michael Landy, Bob Law, Glenn Ligon, Lari Pittman, Amy Sillman, Caragh Thuring and Akram Zaatari.

Preview: 13 February 2020
Public days: 14-16 February 2020

Further information 

Amy Sillman: 'Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman — The Shape of Shape', Museum of Modern Art, New York

For the first in the 'Artist's Choice' series, Amy Sillman has selected nearly 75 works from MoMA's collection that share a fascination with shape, to create a salon-style exhibition.⁣

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Museum of Modern Art

1 W 53rd St

New York

NY 10019

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21 October 2019 - 20 April 2020 

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Amy Sillman: Symposium, Manchester Metropolitan University 

Amy Sillman will particiapte in Funny Peculiar, a symposium that explores contemporary ideas in painting connected to shape, humour and diagrammatic thought.

Thursday 6 June 

1-5:30pm 

Lecture Theatre BS G33

Manchester Metropolitan University Campus

Oxford Road

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Amy Sillman: The Nervous System, The Arts Club of Chicago 

Following the opening of The Nervous System, Amy Sillman will be in conversation Thursday, 23 May, 6-7pm.

The Arts Club of Chicago 

201 E. Ontario Street
Chicago

22 May - 3 August 2019

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Amy Sillman: Artist Talk, Northwestern University

Friday, 17 May, 12pm

Kresge 1305
1880 Campus Dr
Evanston, IL, 60208

Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences,
Northwestern University

Further information 

Amy Sillman: The Drawing Center 2019 Gala

Amy Sillman will be honoured at the forthcoming 2019 Gala at The Drawing Center, New York. 

The Drawing Center 2019 Gala

IAC Building

527 West 18th Street

New York

Wednesday 24 April 2019

6:30 - 10:00pm 

Further information 

Amy Sillman: Amy Sillman in conversation with Harry Dodge, Mueum of Fine Arts Boston

Amy Sillman joins Harry Dodge in a public conversation for the annual Beckwith Lecture established in 1978 by Leo and Betty Beckwith to bring curators and cultural thinkers of national and international stature to the SMFA. 

Harry and Mildred Remis Auditorium (Auditorium 161)

Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Avenue of the Arts 
465 Huntington Avenue 
Boston, Massachusetts 02115

Wednesday 6 March 2019 

7:00 - 8:00pm

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Amy Sillman: Artist Talk

De Ateliers, Amsterdam

2 October, 5-6pm

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Amy Sillman: Landline

Camden Arts Centre, London
28 September, 2018 - 6 January, 2019

Landline will be Amy Sillman's first institutional exhibition in the UK and will feature a new site-specific installation made for Camden Arts Centre. 
Working in a bold new format for the very first time, Sillman has created a sequence of large double-sided works on paper that combine print, drawing and painting.

Further information

Amy Sillman: the ALL-OVER at Portikus

Portikus, Frankfurt

2 July - 4 September, 2016

Portikus presents the ALL-OVER, Amy Sillman's first solo institutional exhibition in Germany. The title of the exhibition refers to a concept often used to describe abstract painting. Sillman updates this idea, of covering the entirity of the canvas, through mechanical means (via inkjet printing) and combines it with the gestural. the ALL-OVER also features a new animation created especially for Portikus, as well as the publication of her tenth zine.

Further information

Painting 2.o:Expression in the Information Age

14 November, 2015 - 30 April, 2016

Museum Brandhorst

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The Whitney Museum is proud to present two works by Amy Sillman at the 2014 Whitney Biennale; 'Mother', a painted work by the artist and 'Fells', a three-dimensional collaboration with sculptor Pam Lins.

On view on the fourth floor of the 2014 Biennial, 'Fells' began with a question posed by sculptor Pam Lins about how to incorporate a painting into a sculpture, a proposal that she has been working for the past decade. Amy Sillman suggested that Lins begin a new work by taking and responding to one of Sillman's own canvases, and this began an ongoing back-and-forth exchange between their two studios. They continued this chain of moves and responses for over a year, Lins adding a form, Sillman changing a painting in reply, Lins painting a panel, and so on. The result is a hybrid structure in which the parts appear somehow coordinated and disjointed at the same time, its sculptural components challenging us to think about three-dimensional space even as its pictorial elements seem to disrupt that solid reality.

Painting is perhaps more vital today than any time since the heyday of the New York School in the late 1940s and 1950s, and Amy Sillman one of its most influential practitioners and thinkers. Through her dramatic shifts in style, sophisticated writings, and her role as head of the painting program at Bard College’s prestigious MFA program, she has proven that the basic building blocks of 20th-century painting are as relevant as ever.

Amy Sillman: one lump or two—the artist’s first museum survey—follows her development as an artist from the mid-1990s to the present, as her work moved from drawing to painting to moving images, and from figuration to abstraction. Featured are more than 90 works, including drawings, paintings, ‘zines (which she calls “a chance to present one’s own epiphanies”), and the artist’s recent forays into animated film.

Sillman’s early works, characterized by cartoon lines and a riot of pastel and acid hues, move effortlessly from figure to landscape, playfully and often humorously exploring problems of physical and emotional scale with observations that are both wry and revealing.

In the mid-2000s, Sillman took a different track as she started to draw couples from life in intimate pencil, ink, and gouache drawings that she then translated from memory into paintings with bold brushstrokes and abstract blocks of rich color. These paintings, with their angular forms and unexpected palettes, proved to be a reinvigorated form of 21st-century abstract expressionism.

As artists started to question painting’s role in an age of reproduction and mass media, many looked to photography. Sillman turned instead to the diagram, injecting into her lush, abstract fields of color the sort of stringent line so often used to communicate complex information. Most recently, Sillman has questioned whether painting needs paint at all, making drawings on her iPhone that she transforms into movies that bring back the neurotic figures of her early images while delving further into the current roles of abstraction, color, and the diagram.

“Sillman is central to the resurgence of public and critical interest in painting and abstraction today,” says Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director. “This exhibition is a long-awaited opportunity for a close encounter with the emotion, awkwardness, energy, and sheer beauty of Amy Sillman’s art.”

Amy Sillman's work foregrounds the materiality of painting and its formal, psychological, and conceptual dimensions. She constructs her work in a physical way - through gesture, color, and drawing-based procedures - and imbues it with questions of feminism, performativity, and humor.

Sillman earned her BFA in 1979 from the School of Visual Arts, New York and her MFA in 1998 from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She has received numerous awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Louise Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts from the American Academy in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited widely and is included in the collections of many prestigious institutions including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and is the Co-Chair of painting at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College.

Sillman's first museum survey, one lump or two, opens at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in October 2013. The exhibition, curated by Helen Molesworth, will travel to the Aspen Museum of Art and the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College.

£5 / Free to ICA Members