Rosa Silver: Meaningful Works and Ongoing Directions
Several works stand as touchstones within Silver’s practice, each embodying her approach to memory, symbolism, and transformation. Her long-standing fascination with water, the sky, and cloud formations reflects a unifying vision, noting that all beings share the same sky and dependence on water, regardless of borders or beliefs. This sense of shared existence deepened through her studies in Kabbalah and during a residency in Assisi, where walking in the footsteps of St Francis became a way to access spiritual perception across time. She walked with an intention to see the world as he did, to feel the sun, to see beyond what her eyes could take in, to look at the Earth in wonder, in awe of it as if all is a miracle. Kabbalah gives her a deep understanding that what she takes in through the five senses is only 1 percent of existence. Both perspectives explore the nature of being human and what it means to walk the Earth.
Originally, Silver was making large installations in New York City, but the material waste conflicted with her environmental beliefs and activism. Influenced by permaculture and the goal of making less waste, she shifted to creating small two-inch watercolor paintings, initially inspired by 1960s school science book illustrations. Her fascination with water has been long-standing, ever since being a little girl playing with the faucet.
One of her most powerful works, entitled Some Kind of Wonderful, arose from an encounter with photographs taken by Henryk Ross inside the Jewish ghetto during the Holocaust. Ross, forced to produce propaganda images, secretly buried thousands of negatives that later surfaced as historical testimony. Silver photographed these photographs, printed sections onto watercolor paper, and engaged them through meditative action using water, color, and ancient symbols. The piece centers on an image of a destroyed temple with a man holding the Torah amid rubble. Beginning with the question of how such cruelty occurs, she used the work as an energetic act of healing, recognizing that destruction and creation often coexist. And during the act of art-making with Kabbalah study, she was reminded of the story that Kabbalah arose from the destruction of the temple.
Another significant piece, Life & Death in Flight: What We’ve Carried, reflects on her family’s escape from antisemitism in Eastern Europe, tracing divergent migration paths that ultimately converged in her own life, begging to question what ancestral baggage do we carry? She is ResourceFULL, originating from a monoprint created in Hawaiʻi, charts stages of life through a series of windows, concluding with an image of release.
Silver’s daily working rhythm resists rigid scheduling, shaped by an awareness that forcing productivity leads to exhaustion rather than insight. Her current limited home studio has encouraged intimate, two-dimensional work in watercolor and printmaking while also fueling a desire to return to large-scale installations and sculptural forms. She continues to pursue projects that address the healing of place and its inhabitants, integrating quantum physics, geographic energy, alchemy, and spiritual study into tangible form. Concurrently, she is writing her memoir, viewing the act of storytelling as another mode of repair. Through radio interviews and broadcasts, including her appearance on KBOO FM, she treats voice and narrative as integral elements of her practice. In her work, she has said that life is an experiment and she is the subject; each medium is part of a unified whole. Each new direction grows organically from the last, sustaining a body of work that remains open, responsive, and deeply invested in care.
