Bobby Silverman
BIOGRAPHY
Bobby Silverman’s work has been exhibited internationally and is held in many private and public collections including the Museum of Arts and Design, the European Ceramic Work Center, The Museum of Fine Arts, and the Renwick Gallery of The Smithsonian American Art Museum.
He has received fellowships from the Louisiana State Council for the Arts, National Endowment
for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, and the Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship. He earned his MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, and his BA in Social Geography from Clark University Worcester. Silverman has taught and lectured in China, the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. He is currently the Director of the Ceramics Center at the 92nd St. Y in New York City.
artist statement
Human interaction with the natural world has never been more catastrophically invasive. Yet the nostalgia for a lost, primeval paradise or the utopia of a saved environment leaves us empty handed. I am interested in the defining the beauty found in a post-natural environment, the world in which we must live, survive and create.
Thus, my current investigation began with the possibilities and intersections of industrial materials with ceramic craft. The conversation of materials forms the basis of an exploration of the dualities that exist in the current post natural order.
Ultimately all forms of surface pigmentation implies a mineral and a medium. Industrial processes such as car painting, chrome,glass or resin coloring complement ceramic glazes in an unparalleled and as yet, unexplored way. The contemporary meets the timeless, the machine meets the hand, chance meets formulated products and forms of application.
Wrestling those highly developed types of surface and color treatment from their respective industries and treating them with the rigor and ethos of traditional craftsmanship reveals the lurking, ironic beauty of humans' heavy hand. The extent of our interventionist self-destruction is also home to our creative impulse.
With this hack, and this line of inquiry, I aim to combine the material richness of contemporary life, the beauty of uniquely crafted objecthood with an awareness of the distress occuring in the natural world.
My proposal is to look at what we have and make it ethical, beautiful and very much of the moment.