June Silverberg (1934-2024)

A native of Brooklyn, June Silverberg studied with well-known New York painters at Brooklyn College in the 1950s, and went on to work with Josep Albers at Yale; later, she also attended the Art Students League and Pratt Institute. From this rather eclectic training, Silverberg came to the commitment to perceptual painting and embrace of the foundations of modernism that she shared with the Bowery Gallery artists; and in 1970 she was voted into the gallery as a member. In 1983, she mounted her first solo show at the Bowery Gallery followed by another solo show at Bowery Gallery in 1993. Over the course of her artistic career, she exhibited her work in over 100 group shows. 

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In the next decades, Silverberg maintained a small studio in a building on Union Square East in Manhattan. When this studio was being cleared by friends of the artist after her death, they found her life's work - including a large cache of paintings and drawings on paper. 

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Silverberg seems to have found her favorite themes locally - the urbanscape of the East River and the urbanscape of buildings and rooftops in the artist's Manhattan neighborhood. Over and over, in all sorts of weather, at different times of day, in oil pastel, pastel and charcoal on formats ranging from the small horizontal pages of her sketchbooks to oversized rectangles of rag paper, Silverberg depicted her neighborhood on the river and on land.