The Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation

Reminder: Applications for the 2026 Grant for Writing on Sculpture are due by 11:59 PM on Sunday, May 31. The grant program of the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation encourages and supports sculptors, whether emerging or established, and writers about sculpture. In 2026 the Foundation will award a $20,000 grant to a writer who demonstrates an exceptional commitment to writing about sculpture, through fresh thinking on the history, aesthetics, purposes, imagination and/or situation of sculpture. Link in Bio. #jonathansilverfoundation

The grant program of the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation encourages and supports sculptors, whether emerging or established, and writers about sculpture. In 2026 the Foundation will award a $20,000 grant to a writer who demonstrates an exceptional commitment to writing about sculpture, through fresh thinking on the history, aesthetics, purposes, imagination and/or situation of sculpture. Link in Bio. #jonathanandbarbarasilverfoundation #sculpturegrant

The Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation’s inaugural Grant for Sculpture has been awarded to Lucia Reissig.  Reissig’s sculpture installations consist of modular forms stacked, suspended or otherwise assembled in ways that evoke presences absent but still there, and labor that speaks of a dignity that, however anonymous, is impossible to forget. History seems both ever present and lost, inescapable yet illegible. Through explorations and accumulations of forms and materials, Reissig holds together intimacy and monumentality, the global history of abstraction and the promise and complexity of community.    The project for which she applied for the Silver grant “represents a shift in both scale and intention. After years of working through modular repetition and resourceful accumulation . . . I am now ready to explore what it means to make a singular, large-scale abstract piece.” This change, Reissig says, reflects a “growing interest in compression, silence, and opacity as sculptural strategies . . . it demands a new relationship with materials, space, and risk.”   For Reissig, as with Jonathan Silver, “the continuity of substances” is an essential idea. Reissig, too, is drawn to the textures and consistencies of materials, including plaster, wax and bronze. And to iteration. For both sculptors, working repeatedly with similar forms and materials generates individual insight and discovery within a sculptural field. The Silver Foundation is proud to support a sculptor at a watershed moment in her career, whose work has the potential to expand the possibilities of the sculptural imagination.  For more details, link in bio. #jonathanandbarbarasilverfoundation #luciareissig #sculpture #sculptureresidency

On September 21, 2025, Michael Brenson, David Smith biographer and artistic director of the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation, Rebecca Smith, artist, David Smith’s older daughter and Co-President of the David Smith Estate, and Sharon Butler, painter and producer of Two Coats of Paint, participated in a panel called “The Life and Work of David Smith.” The panel was presented to members of American Abstract Artists in the Westbeth Community Room, at the Westbeth Artists Community in Lower Manhattan. The video of the event was produced by AAA, on whose website the video is available.  Visitors to the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation are welcome. Link in bio for appointment details. #jonathansilver #jonathanandbarbarasilverfoundation #michaelbrenson #davidsmith #americanabstractartists

Jonathan Silver and the painter Karen Gunderson met in 1983. That year he gave her this remarkable drawing, which helped cement a friendship that lasted until his death nine years later. I don’t know of another sculptor who was more generous with gifts of his work, not just drawings but also sculptures. Works that he cared about and that he hoped, and probably knew, would also matter to the recipients of his gifts. For Silver, who spent so many nights working alone in his studio, gifts such as these were expressions of his belief in the connection between art and friendship, which was inseparable from his belief in a continuity of kinship, over centuries, that was integral to sculptural making and thought. Michael Brenson   Visitors are welcome at the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation. Link in Bio for details #jonathansilver #karengunderson #figurativedrawing #jonathanandbarbarasilverfoundation

New on the JBSF Conversation Series: “Jonathan and Barbara: Sculpture and Empathy” with Choghakate Kazarian. Link in bio. Artistic Director Michael Brenson and art historian and curator Choghakate Kazarian discuss Jonathan Silver’s vulnerable and profoundly human yet somehow still monumental sculpture of Barbara Silver that was the centerpiece of his 1989 installation The Lower Room. @choghakate_kazarian Video and editing: @rachael.bohlander Bohlander. #jonathansilverinprocess #jonathanandbarbarasilverfoundation #jonathansilver #JBSFConversationseries #figurativesculpture #plastersculpture

Link in Bio: Michael Brenson and sculptor Tom Otterness discuss Jonathan Silver’s wax and plaster head on a metal rod in a coffee can. Otterness provides special insight into one of Silver’s most impromptu, revealing and irresistible works. In 1992, Silver gave the work to the filmmaker Coleen Fitzgibbon, Otterness’ wife, in gratitude for her work on the film she was preparing, which she would call “Jonathan Silver: Infidel in the Studio.” Video and editing: Rachael Bohlander. @rachael.bohlander #jonathanandbarbarasilverfoundation #jonathansilverinprocess #jonathansilver #tomotterness

Jonathan Silver Foundation. Jonathan Silver, Mary of Egypt,1983. Plaster, shellacked from waist to foot, 41x8.5x8.75”.  Mary of Egypt is one of Jonathan Silver’s most haunting sculptures. Inspired by a figure of history and/or myth, who may or may not have existed -- one with an erotic and ascetic, worldly and otherworldly, story -- the sculpture seems both available and captured, full and broken, with us and elsewhere. Her presence turns Silver’s East 4th Street studio into a chapel. Photograph taken in the mid-1980’s in Silver’s East 4th Street studio.  #jonathanandbarbarasilverfoundation #jonathansilver #figurativesculpture

@jonathansilverfoundation photo September 2022

The Silver Foundation recently welcomed into its collection this striking female figure, related to but distinctive from the other figures in the collection. Material; bronze. Date inscribed on the bronze, 1988-89. Dimensions: 71x13x9 1/2 inches. Photography by Maxine Marcovitch @maxinemarcovitch . To see a page of Marcovitch’s  photographs of Silver’s work, please visit the foundation’s website [“Selected Sculpture at the Foundation”]. To visit the foundation, please contact us at [email protected] #jonathansilver #jonathanandbarbarasilverfoundation #figurativesculpture .

Jonathan Silver @jonathansilverfoundation 1971, plaster, untitled (photo September 2022)