Val Sivilli

Born in Brooklyn, NY

BIO

Val Sivilli is an artist often using printmaking as a vehicle for expanding the image potential of a painting or a narrative series. Born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, Val was a long-time assistant to the artworld couple Nancy Spero and Leon Golub before moving to the Delaware Valley in Northern New Jersey which she now calls her home. She holds an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and a BFA from SUNY Alfred after transferring from SUNY Purchase. An art educator, she has been an Adjunct Professor of Art since 1996. Once the director of the original Steamroller Gallery, an artist collective in Frenchtown, New Jersey she is a current member of the Steamroller Group, an artist collective working with the Hunterdon Art Museum and other venues to spearhead events that serve to forge connections between artists working in a rural environment.

She is also a founding member of “THAT, The Hunterdon Art Tour”, a county wide tour of Hunterdon County’s Artist Studios. In an attempt to protect her artmaking practice from commercial influences, Val sometimes works under the moniker Civilian, a local graphic design and T-Shirt concern, to supplement her income from teaching and the occasional sale of a painting. Val tends not to stray too far from the banks of the Delaware River as it is her adopted home. You can often find her on the west coast of New Jersey playing the accordion somewhere.

A creative life houses a constant conversation between the private self, the community we inhabit and the memories we carry. People, process and planet form the foundation of all my work . My most recent work explores the culture of gambling and risk. Playing cards are rich with historical, political, and religious symbolism. Card images evolved over the centuries crossing and integrating cultural boundaries. They are a tool in support of the culture of gambling, a culture of money, a culture that deifies royalty. Playing cards were taxed by the Stamp Act that incited the Boston Tea Party. Playing cards are almost always viewed the same upside down and right side up as a sort of mirror image, yet flipped providing a sort of self reflection, but a bit skewed. Personal experience is the backdrop for opinions as well as bias. These paintings are exploring a relationship to risk, an addiction to wealth and a severe reckoning with what white Americans in this and the last century have held dear as our highest ideals. Through the process of painting instinctively and reflectively, each work is distilled into a single element that defines and deconstructs the mythology of being American.