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

about artist michelle silver

Michelle Silver paints emotional landscapes that weave figurative elements through largely abstract compositions. These loose, intuitive paintings emerge from the visceral undercurrent of her dreams and memories. Silver draws on the intimacy and vulnerability of her experiences to explore the contradictions inherent in motherhood: the tension between creation and destruction, restriction and permission, duty and desire. 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 five solo exhibitions, most notably a public art exhibition with ChaShaMa in the lobby of 1155 6th Avenue, NYC in 2025 and a solo show with Elijah Wheat Showroom hosted at Mother-in-Laws in Germantown, NY in 2026. 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, and has been commissioned through Chase Contemporary. She 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.