I am a storyteller. My work focuses on the human impact of social and political systems, especially on people treated as outsiders — those pushed to the margins or given no voice. I often center my work on a single individual, putting a human face to the large, anonymous groups we see paraded across the media.
I work across printmaking, sculpture, drawing, and pastels, using each medium to explore how stories can be carried through marks, surfaces, and physical form. Drawing is often my starting point. Simple lines, textures, and gestures grow into prints or move into three-dimensional space. I’m interested in how something small and personal — a mark, a figure, a trace — can take on weight and presence.
Decisions made by people in power, often far removed from the consequences, have deep and lasting effects on exposed families and communities. This is personal for me. Members of my family were killed because of state-sponsored violence. The pogroms in Eastern Europe — early warnings of the horrors that became the Holocaust — led my grandparents and uncle to leave Belarus and come to New York, where my mother and later I, were born. Many relatives who stayed behind were killed.
Materials play an important role in how I express these ideas. Pastels allow for immediacy and vulnerability. Printmaking involves pressure, layering, and transfer — processes where images shift and change, much like memory and history. Sculpture brings these concerns into physical space, where balance, structure, and fragility become part of the meaning. Surfaces often show erasures, revisions, and built-up layers, holding traces of time and decisions.
By focusing on personal stories and the physical act of making, I aim to give presence and dignity to people who are often reduced to cold statistics. When an experience feels human and tangible, it becomes harder to look away — and harder to deny our connection to one another.
Nomi Silverman
