Gerald Silk
Chair and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art
Ph.D., University of Virginia
A.B., Brandeis University
Dr. Gerald Silk, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, has been Chair of the Art History Department since 2004. He holds an AB in History from Brandeis University and Ph.D. (with distinction) in Art History from the University of Virginia. Silk taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania prior to arriving at Temple in 1988. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art. Areas of focus include: censorship; portraiture; Italian modernism; the Sixties; and technological iconography.
His books include Automobile and Culture and Museums Discovered: the Wadsworth Atheneum and his essays have appeared in Art Criticism, Art Journal, and Artsmagazine.
His many book chapters include: The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, (Abrams, 2009); Donatello Among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (Cornell University Press, 2005); The Airplane in American Culture (University of Michigan Press, 2003); True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern (Greenwood Press, 1998); Suspended License: Essays in the History of Censorship and the Visual Art (University of Washington Press, 1997); and Twentieth Century Art Theory: Urbanism, Politics, and Mass Culture (Prentice-Hall, 1990).
He has written catalogue essays and curated for museums internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Air and Space Museum, Washington; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Hara Museum of Art, Tokyo; and Palazzo Grassi, Venice. He served on the editorial boards of ArtsMagazine and Art Journal and consulted for the Getty Art History Information Program and the Craft & Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles. He has been an American Academy in Rome Prize Fellow, a Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts Senior Fellow, and received grants from the NEH and Mellon Foundation. In 2000, he was recipient of a Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.