While she intended to use her time in Rome to unwind and escape after a grueling series of exhibitions, artist Amy Sillman instead found herself incredibly productive this past fall. As the Mary Miss Artist in Residence, Sillman produced a significant body of drawings and paintings during her time at the Academy. She was also an active participant in community activities—from attending all of the Shoptalks, enthusiastically engaging with Academy walks, to being very supportive of Fellows across a variety of disciplines.
Sillman reports having had an energized time as a Resident, and in a nod to the Academy’s interdisciplinary community, spoke of how living among so many scholars provided her with an opportunity to learn. “The walks have been particularly revealing,” said Silman, “because you see expert scholars interacting and exchanging ideas in their fields of expertise.” Sillman had been pondering the connection between art-making and archaeology, while beginning to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with particular interest in its tales of gender and human/animal transformation.
Before packing up her canvases, Sillman offered the community an impromptu glimpse of new work at an Open Studio and conversation with Andrew Heiskell Arts Director Peter Benson Miller. Informally discussing the psychological and physical aspects of her process before a series of drawings, collages, large colorful canvases, and digital animations, Sillman explained that her layering and relayering of forms comes from an interest in time and a place of “continual dissatisfaction.” When asked about the apparent humor in her work, she explained, “Maybe it is a humor that comes from anxiety. Humor is a destabilizer and that’s the reason for using animations in my shows. I think humor can be used as a critical force in art.”
Having been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Sillman has made remarkable contributions to art that were also been recognized with a Sackler Center First Award from the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in Brooklyn. She imagines that, like her, most Artists-in-Residence are “hybrid animals of world experience and deep isolation,” permitted by the status of their professional achievement to relax into those stirring experiences of “pure curiosity” and “pure joy” that are afforded by a stint at the Academy.