Radiator

Following her arrival in New York in 1975, Sillman immersed herself in the downtown counterculture and was active in feminist and queer circles. Like many of her peers, she was educated under the waning star of Abstract Expressionism. Painting abstractly was not, she recalls, “the expectation for a female art student in the 1970s. . . . At that time it was basically like trespassing.” Despite this, her interest in the movement’s legacy has remained a constant, teaching her important lessons about erasure, process, and chance: “what it means to make work that forces you to improvise,” as Sillman conceives it.