Bio:

Emily Silver is a Los Angeles–based artist working across sculpture, textiles, and drawing. Her work translates language into material form through process-driven, fiber-based structures that hold tension between legibility and abstraction.

She is Chair of the Art and Art History Department and Professor of Sculpture at Santa Monica College, and Director/Curator of the Pete and Susan Barrett Gallery. She is a co-founder of LA Tactile Lab and previously co-founded Unpaved Gallery.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Statement:

I make sculptural weavings that translate language into structure.

Working across textiles, sculpture, and drawing, I embed text, coded symbols, and shifting materials to produce forms that move between legibility and abstraction—where humor and grief sit uncomfortably close.

Shaped by experiences of loss, bodily change, and broader instability, my work engages labor as a form of endurance. Fibers are bound, layered, and reworked through time-intensive processes that register care and persistence rather than resolution.

What appears decorative operates as a system—holding contradiction without hierarchy, where tenderness and force remain visible at once.

Contact: emilysilverstudio@gmail.com