Join us for a talk: Silver Stories. Silver Stories is a hauntingly poetic, genre-defying narrative by artist Micaela Amateau Amato. Experimental "diasporic conversations" merge feminist storytelling, political rage, and ecological ancestral wisdom. Through fragmented vignettes and visual interludes, Amato invites readers into a lyrical exploration of memory, injustice, love, trauma, and the mystical power of voice. Weaving together autobiography, political reckoning, spiritual reflection, and her visual art, Amato's narrative is deeply rooted in her Sephardic-Mizrahi heritage and diasporic experience. Silver Stories unfold in layers—palimpsests and pentimentos across time—inked in metaphorical silver. The narrative is illustrated with Amato’s cast glass sculptures, mixed-media portraits, archival photographic montages, and abstract painted evocations of earth, sea, and wind that extend the text—becoming spectral witnesses to the stories being told.

“The dizzying reflectivity of Micaela Amateau Amato’s work is intended to throw viewers off balance, into the shifting time and space where the artist lives and which defines her political position. For all her aspirations to peace and balance, the kaleidoscopic frequency of Amato’s surfaces and assembled forms can be downright frenetic. In her search for a density that is never static, she inevitably seems on the edge of overload, pulling the work back from the brink by endowing it with lyrical complexity.” Lucy R. Lippard

Micaela Amato Amateau Distinguished Professor Emerita SOVA & WGSS, is a visual artist, curator, writer, and environmental activist. She gained recognition internationally and across the U.S. for her paintings, large scale cibachrome photographs, and life size cast-glass portrait heads that emerged from her ancient Iberian and Maghreb ancestry. Reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Women's Art Journal, and Art in America, she has received several National Endowment for the Arts Awards and two Pollock Krasner Awards. Her fifty gouache paintings illustrate the critically acclaimed eco-social justice book Zazu Dreams Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, written by her daughter and collaborator Cara Judea Alhadeff.