Silvianna Goldsmith
This from quiet, diminutive New York artist Silvianna Goldsmith who specializes in work with and of dancers.
Silvia Anna grew up with a mother she felt would have made a good Ruth Bader Ginsberg, "totally straight," and a father she describes as "creative" and a "rebel."
In the family, several other rebels appeared. An uncle, Oscar Lewis, a famous anthropologist, took Silvia Anna and her sister on their first trip to Cuba. She was to make more trips there and also to Europe. "I was this hot shot little music and art kid," encouraged by her uncle. They had seen Picasso's works in Paris and Uncle Oscar turned to her and said, "You could do that!" She agreed with him. She counts herself lucky to have had that uncle "who was very nonsexist...and to have had this opportunity to travel and live different places."
She dropped out of college. "My mother thought I was totally crazy." Silivianna accepted a scholarship to an art school (New Bauhaus, no less) and wherever she was, she took dance classes, "usually modern...My goal was to be a dancer." She studied under Mary Wigman and at the Martha Graham school. In Cuba, while studying ballet, she was asked to help a modern choreographer and be an apprentice. Wigman wanted her to join her in Berlin. "Kurt Joos made a speech about me. I don't think they had seen anything like me." She explained that in post-war Europe, their modern was still rather balletic. Silivianna was working in the strong, angular, turned-in style that modern dancers in the United States were using.
Why didn't she accept these offers? "There was no modern dance in Paris. And you couldn't really make a living as a dancer. I guess I wanted to be between Martha Graham and Pablo Picasso."
She returned to New York, studying dance and painting, focusing in what was to become abstract expressionism. She was exhibiting and working, approaching her thirties, and "bit the dust," returning to college for a degree. She majored in languages, receiving her Masters in French. She also enjoyed teaching art, language modern dance and film.
War protests introduced to her film. As the anti-Vietnam sentiments grew, Silvianna and her "alternative artist" friends did performance art to be heard as "The Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG). I think I came to film backwards." It became a way to preserve their work. "You would make this happening or do this performance piece one day and then the next it is gone. Everyone was arrested or dragged away." You can find photos of her in covered in blood and chains.
She began working on feminist issues. In school, she had noted that there were no women artists in college. Now she and her friends realized the female artists were underrepresented. WAR came next--Women Artists in Revolution. Silvia Anna became Silvianna when she "wrote the 'Call to Arms', reviewed in "The New York Post." X-12 was the first feminist art show.
Women artists are now honored with exhibitions and awards because of her drive to right wrongs and correct these omissions. Silvianna has won a number of awards and has had her works exhibited world-wide. She has no rap sheet, but feels she does have an FBI file. She laughs about how men would come during their protests pretending to be one of them "with their square faces, plaid country shirts and jeans, looking totally inappropriate," copying their names from the name tags the artists wore.
Her words and her arts describe her the best: "As an artist, my concerns are Eco-feminist: Woman and her relation to Nature, combined with images of flowers, wooden tree trunks, stone, sea, air, the flesh of the body and material interact. This merging of body and nature evokes ancient anthropomorphic and pantheistic deities. Creation can be through letting go, as if into trance and a trust of the ancient wisdom. Woman is affirmed as a source of the eternal cycle of creation and destruction, animus, anima, leading to wholeness and healing.
My background has been as a multi-media artist, involved with photography, film, video, painting and performance art. I have defined myself as an artist since my teens as a student at Music and Art High School. I was a scholarship student at the Chicago Institute of Design, and an early disciple of Wifredo Lam, the Cuban surrealist painter. I was in the first feminist art show, the X-12, writing the press release, quoted by Grace Glues in the New York Times Magazine and Lawrence Dalloway in The Nation. I was active with the performance artists of the early 70's including Meredith Monk, Carolee Schneernnnn. I was the
founding member of "Women/ Artist/Filmmakers," which received production grants from NEA and NYSCA and with whom I showed my films internationally."
Silvianna is still at work.