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

about artist michelle silver

Michelle Silver's loose, intuitive paintings weave figurative elements through largely abstract compositions. Emerging from the visceral undercurrent of dreams and memories, her work draws on the intimacy and vulnerability of lived experience to explore the contradictions inherent in motherhood: creation and destruction, restriction and permission, duty and desire.

Silver works in alternating sessions of strategy and surrender, applying thick paint with a silicone tool before smearing, slashing, and scraping it away. Her process is highly physical, often involving full-body movement, and the resulting layered surfaces vibrate with the energy of their making. Through this interplay of control and surrender, Silver explores the complex and sometimes convoluted experience of the maternal body, psyche, and identity within a culture that demands profound responsibility from mothers while offering limited structural support.

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 five solo exhibitions. Notable exhibitions include a solo public art exhibition with ChaShaMa in the lobby of 1155 6th Avenue, NYC in 2025, a solo show with Elijah Wheat Showroom in 2026, and an upcoming two-person presentation at Spring/Break Art Show with Plastic Arts in Fall 2026. Her work is part of the Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection and in private collections throughout the United States and in Australia. She has been commissioned through Chase Contemporary, was featured in the Visionary Projects Directory and will be participating in the Visionary Projects Residency in Mexico City in 2027. 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, Surface Mag, Arts to Hearts Project, Times Union, Two Coats of Paint, Artscope Magazine, Art Business News, Highlands Current, The Daily Catch and Chronogram.