Wednesday, October 4 @ 5:00 – 6:15pm
Elvehjem L160
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Online at Zoom: uwmadison.zoom.us/my/artcolloquium
Susie J. Silbert (she/her) is a curator, thought leader, and advocate for artists. Her curatorial practice is expansive, artist-centered, and community oriented. Her projects challenge traditional boundaries to create new + authentic connections between people, histories, objects, and materials. She builds innovative projects that challenge assumptions about artistic disciplines and bring lesser-known histories to light.
From 2016 – 2023, Silbert was Curator of Postwar and Contemporary Glass at The Corning Museum of Glass where she brought visionary leadership to the Museum’s contemporary initiatives, redesigning the Museum’s flagship publication New Glass Review, diversifying the Museum’s collection through ambitious acquisitions and commissions, and providing thought leadership on contemporary glass internally and externally. Silbert took an activist approach to her selection and stewardship of the Museum’s Rakow Commission, seeking to use the opportunity of the annual award to help enable the creation of works that would not otherwise be supported by the market. Her groundbreaking international survey exhibition, New Glass Now, designed to introduce new audiences and new approaches to glass, debuted in Corning in 2019, before traveling to the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C. and the Toyama Museum of Glass in Toyama, Japan.
Silbert holds a Master’s degree in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material culture from the Bard Graduate Center and a BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has held a range of curatorial positions including fellowships at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, and as the in-house curator for glass innovator Mark Peiser in Penland, North Carolina. She taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and has curated exhibitions at Parsons The New School for Design, Kansas City Art Institute, and UrbanGlass among others. Her writing has appeared in books and catalogues for Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Chrysler Museum, The Museum for Art in Wood, UrbanGlass, and others as well as in the magazines American Art Collector, American Craft, GLASS Quarterly, and Metalsmith. A leading voice in contemporary glass and artistic practice, she is a sought after speaker and visiting critic and has lectured at museums and universities across the country and around the world.