SALLY SILBERBERG

CV

BIO

American, b. 1945, Syracuse, NY
lives and works in Plainfield, MA

Sally Silberberg began her professional career in 1969 as a traditional production stoneware potter producing utilitarian forms. Through the following decade, she began working translucent porcelain, her glazes became painterly abstractions, and her pots became vessels. In the early 80’s, Silberberg experimented with nerikomi, a technique uniting her interests in color and sculptural form. Exploring the vulnerabilities of the clay material through large scale solid forms and movement in the firing process, her work became an amalgam of fissures and disruptions of lines that converged three-dimensional forms. The tension between graphic, two-dimensional patterning within a three-dimensional structure led Silberberg to painting, which thirty-years later, is a continuation of the energy that grew from the works in clay.

Silberberg’s ceramic sculpture has been exhibited internationally at the Everson Museum, (Syracuse, NY), the Woodmere Museum, (Philadelphia, PA), East-West Contemporary Ceramics Exhibition, (Mino, Japan), the Parrish Art Museum, (Southampton, NY), and the Institute of Design, (Sacramento, CA). She has received numerous awards, including a fellowship from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. In 1967,  Silberberg graduated with a BFA in ceramic design from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Her studies included a year abroad at Nyckelviksskolan, Stockholm, Sweden and an introduction to modernist aesthetics. Silberberg’s first small studio in Brooklyn, NY, the Clay Pot, moved to Plainfield, MA in 1974.