Amy Sillman

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Amy Sillman is an artist whose 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. She has published Amy Sillman: Works on Paper (Gregory R. Miller, 2006), a monograph of her drawings with text by Wayne Koestenbaum, and is cochair of the painting program at the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. During her fellowship semester, Sillman will continue to paint and draw, as well as explore the idea of using the diagram to describe the process of contemporary painting. She will also develop a video and text work about historical and contemporary painting practices in New York City, a project that originated with her interest in Emile de Antonio’s 1972 documentary Painters Painting. Sillman earned her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. She has received numerous awards and grants, including a Biennial Competition Artists Award from the Louise Comfort Tiffany Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Guna S. Mundheim Berlin Prize in the Visual Arts from the American Academy in Berlin Fellowship. Her work has been widely exhibited and collected, including by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.