Susan Silton: Diving into the Wreck
Los Ángeles Municipal Art Gallery
September 3 - November 22, 2026
Blaffer Art Museum (University of Houston)
January through March, 2027
Susan Silton: Diving into the Wreck
For more than four decades, Los Angeles-based artist Susan Silton has explored how language, images, and acts of participation shape our understandings of history, identity, and public life. Working across performance, installation, photography, video, sound, graphic design, and publishing, Silton examines the intersection between personal experience and larger political and cultural forces.
This exhibition, the first major survey of Silton’s work, brings together more than 150 works spanning the 1980s to the present. The title, Diving into the Wreck, is borrowed from a 1973 poem by Adrienne Rich, in which a diver’s act of descending to explore a submerged wreck becomes a search for truth and memory. Like Rich’s diver, Silton uses language as both a tool of inquiry and a means of reimagining the world.
Across the exhibition, recurring themes emerge: the body and voice, perspective and vision, public memory, and the use of graphics and multiples. Whether drawing on the experiences of families affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, examining the visual culture of authoritarianism, or transforming graphic design into a form of political and commercial critique, Silton asks how the combination of images and words shape our shared reality, and how they might be reworked to imagine more just futures.