Susan Silas


	Biography
	> bio EDUCATION: Susan 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: 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. Shortly afterwards, she was invited to teach at New York University, and in 1993 was a visiting artist at Cooper Union. Silas continued to teach at NYU while actively exhibiting work throughout the United States and Europe. A number of Silas’ essays were featured in ArtNet magazine. During the past decade, Silas' work has focused primarily on Holocaust issues, and she has produced and exhibited several major photographic and video works, including one sound piece exploring this complex and charged historic episode. In 2002, after Silas retraced the steps of a 1945 death march, the BBC radio interviewed her for a program examining the history of walking. In 2005, her work was shown in a solo exhibition at the Koffler Gallery in Toronto, featuring her recent project, Helmbrechts walk, 1998-2003; which documents her 225 mile walk in Germany and the Czech Republic retracing the steps of an historical death march at the close of the Second World War. Simultaneously, they presented her 2001 video installation, Untitled (11-14 May 1998). While preparing these works, Silas was awarded grants from: the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (1998, 2000); the Lee and Lawrence J. Ramer Foundation (1998); The Puffin Foundation (1998); and the André and Elizabeth Kertesz Foundation (1997). Additionally, Silas’ photographs from New York appeared in the two ad hoc exhibitions, Here is New York and The September 11 Photo Project, both emerging from the aftermath of 9/11. Academic interest tracing Silas’ practice and work has increased in recent years. A chapter of Dora Apel's, Memory Affects; The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing is devoted to Silas’ recent work. Additionally, Silas’ recent works are cited in Unwanted Beauty; Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation, by the scholar Brett Kaplan, and are also the subject of two forthcoming articles, one by Brett Kaplan and the other by Nancy Neild. Her photographs of Buchenwald and Treblinka are reproduced in Ulrich Baer's Remnants of Song; Trauma and the experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan. Silas received her BA in History at Reed College in Portland, Oregon and her MFA in Fine Art and Photography at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.