Michelle Silver in her studio, 2025. Photo by Bradley Silver.

about artist michelle silver

Michelle Silver paints emotional landscapes that combine steadied intention with bursts of frenetic motion. Sometimes figurative, often abstract, her painted worlds exist in the space between the conscious and subconscious, in the area guided by intuition. Silver uses the intimacy and vulnerability of her experiences as a platform to discuss themes of mental health, trauma, desire, and fear and to highlight the lack in systemic support for mothers in America. She works in alternating sessions of strategy and surrender, moving through the work in exaggerated strokes of thick paint applied with a silicone tool before it is smeared, slashed, and scraped away. Dancing while she paints, her layered work vibrates with the mode of its creation: rage, despair, ecstasy, power – a complex and sometimes convoluted display of the female and motherhood experience.

Raised in the Catskill Mountains of New York, Michelle Silver (b. 1987) is a painter, curator and graphic designer living and working in the Hudson Valley, NY. She is the Gallery Director of Distortion Society, a combined art gallery and tattoo studio in Beacon, NY that she founded in 2023 with her tattoo artist husband Bradley Silver.

Silver has exhibited throughout the US and in the UK; she has had four solo exhibitions, most recently a public art exhibition with ChaShaMa in the lobby of 1155 6th Avenue, NYC. Her fifth solo show DEVOUR opens Summer 2026 with Elijah Wheat Showroom. Her work is part of the Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection and in private collections throughout the United States and in Australia. She is a represented artist with Plastic Arts, has been commissioned through Chase Contemporary, and is featured in the Visionary Projects Directory. Silver was a Finalist in the Spring 2025 Homiens Art Prize and on the Extended Longlist for the 2026 Jackson’s Art Prize. Her painting and curation have been included in publications such as The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Cool Hunting, Arts to Hearts Project, Times Union, Two Coats of Paint, Artscope Magazine, Art Business News, and Chronogram.

To request a full CV, please email michelle@michelle-silver.com