Professor Emeritus, Modern and Contemporary Art
Art History
Gerald Silk, PhD
- Email: gsilk@temple.edu
Gerald Silk is a modern and contemporary art historian with interests in Italian modernism, technological iconography, art and controversy and the intersection of style, politics and meaning in the visual arts. His current projects cover ethics and human and non-human animals in art and the relationship between the sexual revolution and Philadelphia bicentennial public commissions in 1976.
He publishes and lectures widely and is the author of books and book chapters, catalogues, articles and reviews. His work can be found in the periodicals, Art Journal; Art Criticism and Women’s Art Journal and the selected anthologies, True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern; Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy; Suspended License: Censorship and the Visual Arts and Twentieth Century Art Theory: Urbanism, Politics, and Mass Culture. He is the author of Automobile and Culture and Museums Discovered: The Wadsworth Atheneum.
He has worked with museums and galleries internationally, including the Hara Museum of Art, Tokyo; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Air and Space Museum, Washington, District of Columbia and Palazzo Grassi, Venice. Selected awards include the American Academy in Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies; Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; National Endowment for the Humanities; Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Andrew W. Mellon Incentive Grant and Temple University’s Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.
PhD, University of Virginia, 1976
BA, Brandeis University, 1970
Selected Work
Silk, G. (2013, Fall). In and Out of Shape: The Art of Reva Urban. Women’s Art Journal, 34(2), 21-28.
Silk, G. (2009). Pop and Minimalism: More or Less; and Gino Severini, Still Life; Franz Kline,
Crossways; Robert Indiana, The Calumet; Claes Oldenburg, Tray Meal; Mel Ramos, You Get More
Salami With Modigliani; Tom Wesselmann, Still Life; Robert Cottingham, Discount Store; Ralph
Goings, Bank of America; David Parrish, Yamaha; Robert Colescott, I Gets a Thrill Too When I
Sees De Koo [Various entries]. In M. Rush (Ed.), The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis (pp. 131-136
and 52, 111, 145, 154, 155, 166, 184, 195, 205, 235). New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams.
Silk, G. (2005). Il Primo Pilota: Mussolini, Fascist Aeronautical Symbolism, and Imperial Rome. In R.
Crum, & C. Lazzaro (Eds.), Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual
Culture of Fascist Italy (pp. 67-81). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Silk, G. (2003). Our Future is in the Air: Aviation and American Art. In D. Pisano (Ed.), The Airplane in
American Culture (pp. 250-296). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Silk, G. (1997). Censorship and Controversy in the Career of Edward Kienholz. In E. Childs (Ed.),
Suspended License: Essays in the History of Censorship and the Visual Arts (pp. 259-298). Seattle,
WA: University of Washington Press.