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The Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation Grants for Sculpture and Writing on Sculpture
In this grant program, the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation’s goal is to encourage and support sculptors as well as writers on sculpture, both emerging and established.
Winner Selected for the 2024 Grant for Writing on Sculpture
Brooklyn, NY—December 6, 2024—The Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation is pleased to announce that Alex A. Jones is the recipient of its inaugural grant for writing on sculpture. The $20,000 grant will support a long-form essay called “The Aesthetics of Regeneration: Bending the L.A. River.” more
Statement from the Director
Jonathan Silver was a sculptor and writer. He worked from the model and from his imagination. He was passionately interested in the history of sculpture, from ancient Egypt and Hellenistic Greece through Michelangelo, Rodin, Giacometti, and Richard Serra. The questions he asked himself about sculpture were fundamental. Why, since prehistory, had human beings needed sculpture? What made this sculpture successful and not that one? What enabled some sculptures to stand on their own and how had other sculptures defined and become inseparable from the environments they created? How did process, materials, and form express both individual personality and history and the world in which the work emerged? How could sculpture become a vehicle for ideas?
Silver’s sculpture and writing are rigorous and fearless, as well as provocative and searching. While working on plaster heads and figures, he read epic poetry and European novels and studied Greek and Hebrew thought. His exploration of sculptural rhetoric and verbal rhetoric—as well as musical rhetoric—went hand in hand. His pressure on himself to find visual and verbal expression for the deepest levels of experience is essential to his identity and legacy. In the months before Silver died in 1992, at the age of fifty-four, his sculpture was changing again, and he fantasized about more changes. “If I make it through this illness,” he said, “I’ll make figures that dance.” It is no more possible to imagine the sculpture he would have made than it is to imagine what he would have written.
The Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation regards writing on sculpture, like sculpture, as a field with unlimited potential. The foundation is a place in which making and finding language for sculpture are equally at home.
– Michael Brenson, Artistic Director, the Jonathan and Barbara Silver Foundation
Grant Program Overview
The JBSF offers one $20,000 grant per year.
The JBSF grant program operates on a 2-year cycle with alternating grants that support writing in even years and sculpture in odd years. Applications are now open for the sculpture grant. The next writing grant application will be available in 2026.
Funds will go toward creating a work or a body of work that is essential to the artist’s development and a contribution to sculpture as a field.
The sculpture grant is specifically for an artist who demonstrates an exceptional commitment to sculpture that includes an informed and imaginative engagement with its materials, histories, and situation.
The writing grant is specifically for a writer who generates fresh writing and thinking on the history, aesthetics, purposes, imagination or situation of sculpture.
The grant recipient is expected to complete the project within one year of receiving the award.
For detailed instructions on how to apply, please see our Grant Application page.