Rachel Silveri is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art + Art History at the University of Florida. She specializes in the history of modern art in Europe and North America, with a particular emphasis in early twentieth-century French modernism. Her research interests include theories and historiographies of the avant-gardes; theories of the everyday; feminist thought and queer theory.
Silveri’s current book project, The Art of Living in the Historical Avant-Garde, reexamines the avant-garde ambition to unify art and everyday life through a set of experimental life practices established by artists across Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism. Focusing on Tristan Tzara’s performances of identity, Sonia Delaunay’s fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavor to work the Surrealist Research Bureau, her research proposes a broader envisioning of avant-garde material culture to examine the ways in which artists creatively produced an “art of living” relative to the normative types of “lifestyle” produced contemporaneously in France during the years 1910-1930. By elaborating these practices, her book expands current definitions of avant-garde politics to include an ethics of self-making.
She is in the preliminary stages of a second project, tentatively titled "It Was Yesterday, Dada": Women's Histories of the Avant-Garde, which considers how various women artists, models, and muses contributed to the avant-garde and challenged its dominant narratives through forms of memoir-writing and autobiography.
Educated at the University of Michigan (B.A. History of Art and Women’s Studies, with Highest Honors in History of Art, 2008) and Columbia University (Ph.D. Art History and Archaeology, 2017), Silveri is the recipient of grants from The Getty Foundation, The Alliance Program, The Starr Foundation, The Stillman-Lack Foundation, and The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation. From 2014–2015, she was a Mellon-funded Museum Research Consortium Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art where she worked on a retrospective of the artist Francis Picabia. She joined the Art History program at the University of Florida in 2018. She is affiliate faculty in the Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women's Studies Research, as well as the Center for Arts, Migration + Entrepreneurship.