The Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation Grants for Sculpture and Writing on Sculpture
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tement from the Director
Jonathan Silver was a sculptor and writer. He worked from the model
and from his imagination. He was passionately interested in the history
of sculpture, from ancient Egypt and Hellenistic Greece through
Michelangelo, Rodin, Giacometti, and Richard Serra. The questions he
asked himself about sculpture were fundamental. Why, since prehistory,
had human beings needed sculpture? What made this sculpture successful
and not that one? What enabled some sculptures to stand on their own and
how had other sculptures defined and become inseparable from the
environments they created? How did process, materials, and form express
both individual personality and history and the world in which the work
emerged? How could sculpture become a vehicle for ideas?
Silver’s
sculpture and writing are rigorous and fearless, as well as provocative
and searching. While working on plaster heads and figures, he read epic
poetry and European novels and studied Greek and Hebrew thought. His
exploration of sculptural rhetoric and verbal rhetoric—as well as
musical rhetoric—went hand in hand. His pressure on himself to find
visual and verbal expression for the deepest levels of experience is
essential to his identity and legacy. In the months before Silver died
in 1992, at the age of fifty-four, his sculpture was changing again, and
he fantasized about more changes. “If I make it through this illness,”
he said, “I’ll make figures that dance.” It is no more possible to
imagine the sculpture he would have made than it is to imagine what he
would have written.
The Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation
regards writing on sculpture, like sculpture, as a field with unlimited
potential. The foundation is a place in which making and finding
language for sculpture are equally at home.
– Michael Brenson, Artistic Director, the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation
Grant Program Overview
The JBSF offers one $20,000 grant per year.
The JBSF grant program operates on a 2-year cycle with alternating grants that support writing in even years and sculpture in odd years. We are currently accepting applications for the Writing Grant. The next Sculpture Grant application will be available in 2027.
The Writing Grant is specifically for a writer who generates
fresh writing and thinking on the history, aesthetics, purposes,
imagination or situation of sculpture.
The Sculpture Grant is
specifically for an artist who demonstrates an exceptional commitment
to sculpture that is informed by an imaginative engagement with its
materials, histories, and situation.
The grant recipient is expected to complete the project within one year of receiving the award.
For detailed instructions on how to apply, please see our Grant Application page.
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