GRANT AWARD RECIPIENTS

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The Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation’s inaugural Grant for Sculpture has been awarded to Lucia Reissig.

Reissig’s sculpture installations consist of modular forms stacked, suspended or otherwise assembled in ways that evoke presences absent but still there, and labor that speaks of a dignity that, however anonymous, is impossible to forget. History seems both ever present and lost, inescapable yet illegible. Through explorations and accumulations of forms and materials, Reissig holds together intimacy and monumentality, the global history of abstraction and the promise and complexity of community.  

As influences, Reissig cites artists such as Nairy Baghramian, Lygia Clark, Eva Hesse, Ana Maria Maiolino and Erika Verzutti. She cites texts such as Repetition Nineteen by Mónica de la Torre, “in which translation is treated not as reproduction, but as transformation—an affective, feminist method,” and The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, which “reframes narrative—and by extension, culture—not around conquest or tools of domination, but around the container: the vessel that holds, gathers, and sustains.”  

Reissig has extensively studied Latin American mercados. For her the mercado is “a sculptural and social site, one where exchange is tactile, symbolic, and sustained by care.”

The project for which she applied for the Silver grant “represents a shift in both scale and intention. After years of working through modular repetition and resourceful accumulation . . . I am now ready to explore what it means to make a singular, large-scale abstract piece.” This change, Reissig says, reflects a “growing interest in compression, silence, and opacity as sculptural strategies . . . it demands a new relationship with materials, space, and risk.”

For Reissig, as with Jonathan Silver, “the continuity of substances” is an essential idea. Reissig, too, is drawn to the textures and consistencies of materials, including plaster, wax and bronze. And to iteration. For both sculptors, working repeatedly with similar forms and materials generates individual insight and discovery within a sculptural field.

The Silver Foundation is proud to support a sculptor at a watershed moment in her career, whose work has the potential to expand the possibilities of the sculptural imagination.  

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Lucía Reissig is an Argentinian-Guatemalan sculptor based in New York whose work examines how bodies and objects hold memory through care, domestic labor, informal economies, and food politics. Informed by feminist theory and strategies of abstraction, she creates sculptural works that blur the lines between affection, politics, and form. Her recent practice centers on casting and repetition, both as method and metaphor, often returning to containers and vessels as carriers of memory.

Reissig trained in artist-run spaces before completing the Artist Program at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (2017–18), later joining Escuela Incierta at Lugar a Dudas in Cali, Colombia, and receiving her MFA in Sculpture from Bard College in 2024. Her collaborative projects span feminist archival publishing, queer food politics, community-based pedagogy, and the spiritual dimensions of domestic labor.

In 2021, she published Pisos pegajosos with the Chilean press Hambrehambrehambre. Her recent solo exhibitions include Glossary (mimo, New York, 2025) and 287.5 kilos (Móvil, Buenos Aires, 2023). She was awarded the Kenneth Kemble Prize for Visual Arts (2018) and the Premio en Obra at Arteba (2019). In 2025, she was an artist-in-residence at Mass MoCA Studios and at Millay Arts.

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The Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation’s inaugural Grant for Writing on Sculpture has been awarded to Alex A. Jones.

Jones is a gifted storyteller and historian, with a discerning eye and an ability to engage the reader both intellectually and emotionally. Her writing is grounded in research and experience. She champions sculpture’s potential to respond to ecological emergency, and to foster healing. Her proposal, called “The Aesthetics of Regeneration: Bending the L.A. River,” is for a long-form essay that will examine Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio’s Bending the River, placing this elaborate and ambitious ecological sculpture, one that implicates “an entire system of human and nonhuman actors,” within the contexts of Los Angeles, art and activism, and regenerative art practice. With the project’s ‘sculptural core,” a 47-foot reservoir or “mother well,” buried underground, and much of the project’s development dependent on behind-the-scenes negotiations with and between the public and private sectors, Jones will illuminate the unseen forms and processes involved in bringing Bending the River to fruition and make them part of her story. The Silver Foundation is proud to support a writer with a love of language and sculpture and an independent point of view. 

Alex A. Jones is a writer on art, ecology, and the occult. In 2022 she received the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Award for her project “Art and Ecology in the Third Millennium.” She is a co-creator of collaborative projects including the Queer Ecologies Research Collective and the film collective VIROSA. Jones has published art criticism with the Brooklyn Rail and delivered numerous workshops and presentations on topics including environmental history, cosmic horror, queer ecology, interspecies dialogues, and expanded cinema. As a freelance researcher she has worked on curatorial projects for the New York Botanical Garden, the Smithsonian Institution, M+ Museum of Visual Culture in Hong Kong, and Mildred’s Lane. She studied art history, theory, and criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art. 


The mission of the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation is to protect, preserve and expand the legacy of Jonathan Silver. Silver (1937-1992) was a sculptor, art historian, writer and teacher. Fiercely independent, at times iconoclastic, with an analytical intensity and operative imagination, he was passionately interested in the history of sculpture and in the ways in which, over centuries and across cultures, sculpture has commanded attention and inspired powerful visions and moving and at times wild, even dangerous, thought and behavior. 

The Silver Foundation began its grant program in 2024. It will alternate grants for writing on sculpture and grants for sculpture. Its 2025 grant will be for sculpture. Guidelines will appear on the foundation’s website by February 1. The deadline for applications will be May 31, 2025. 

For further information, please contact info@jonathanandbarbarasilverfoundation.org.