Aviva Silverman is an artist and activist based in New York, working primarily with sculpture and performance to anatomize how objects, images and bodies become vessels for divine information, interlacing histories of art, religion and value. Their practice often employs miniatures, votive dioramas, and nonhuman actors to investigate technologies of spiritual and political surveillance. They are interested in the protective intentions that ritual objects carry; the material histories of Abrahamic faiths infinitely repeating a lexicon of angels, iconography, prayer hands, rosaries. Dislocated from familiar physical and temporal scales, these kitsch objects and mass-made icons hold their freightedness while fixing the ineffability of faith within their embodied materiality. In highlighting the systems of interdependence often necessary to sustain vulnerable, marginalized communities, Silverman’s use of sculpture to consider alternative histories of individuals erased by the reductive monumentality of historic narrative has laid the groundwork for much of their activism. Silverman has exhibited at numerous galleries and museums including Park Avenue Armory, New York; MoMA P.S.1, Long Island City; Volksbühne, Berlin; and the Swiss Institute, New York. Their work has appeared in Artforum, The New Yorker, BBC Radio, Art in America, Flash Art, and Art Papers. They have an ongoing engagement with oral history as the digital custodian of the New York City Trans Oral History Project; and have previously taught at the Dia Art Foundation, New York. They are represented by Veda located in Milan, Italy.

Alumni Affiliation 

Interdisciplinary Sculptural BFA, '08