Who was Jonathan Silver?
Jonathan Silver was a Brooklyn born sculptor, who gained recognition in the 1980s for his emotionally charged operatic sculpture installations. Jonathan began as a scholar of art history at Columbia University before moving into making his own genre bending artworks. His work draws from the hellenistic tradition, as well as Rodin, Giacometti and Freudian psychoanalysis. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Montclair State College in New Jersey, and the New York Studio School. His work was written up in The New York Times, Art in America, and Art News, among others.
In a 1986 review NYTimes art critic Michael Brenson described Silver’s process,
“Silver’s aim is syncretic. He combines Christianity, Judaism, Rome, Greece and modernism in a way that is very different from postmodern appropriation. For one thing, he knows a great deal about the sources he uses, and he is not defensive about letting us know that they matter to him. He takes one chunk from here, another from there, and then struggles to assemble works that can suggest both the crushing gravity of the fragmentation and the possibility of clawing and climbing towards a new whole.”
Jonathan Silver: Infidel in the Studio 
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