Affiliation

Faculty Associate at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice

Erin Silver specializes in contemporary Canadian art and queer and feminist art, visual culture, performance, and activism. She is the author of Taking Place: Building Histories of Queer and Feminist Art in North America (Manchester University Press, 2023) and Suzy Lake: Life & Work (Art Canada Institute, 2021), as well as editor of Art and Feminisms: Histories, Methods, and Legacies (Routledge, 2026) and co-editor (with Amelia Jones) of Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2016). She has also co-edited special issues of Journal of Canadian Art History (2022) and C Magazine (2017) and is co-editor (with Martha Langford) of the McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History series. Silver has curated exhibitions at the FOFA Gallery (Concordia University, Montreal), the ArQuives (Toronto), and the Doris McCarthy Gallery (University of Toronto Scarborough). Her writing has appeared in C Magazine, CAA Reviews, Canadian Art, Ciel Variable, Prefix Photo, Fuse Magazine, Momus, Performance Matters, Sculpture Journal, Visual Resources, and in the volume Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (ed. Martha Langford, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), as well as in various exhibition catalogues in the areas of contemporary Canadian and queer and feminist art. Silver is the Principal Investigator of the 5-year (2023–2028) SSHRC Insight Grant project “Queer Operatives: Writing, Making, and Transmitting Queer Canadian Art Histories” and, with Melanie O’Brian, co-leads the Curatorial Research Excellence Cluster (UBC). Silver currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne, the affiliate journal of the Universities Art Association of Canada, having served as an editor of the journal from 2019–2025 and following the end of her term as President of UAAC (2022–2025).

Photo credit: Sky Goodden

Canadian art, modern and contemporary art, queer and feminist art, the visual culture of activism, performance and movement studies