The Silva Screen: Portraits of American Actor Henry Silva

As a quintessential Hollywood bad guy, Henry Silva has often been typecast as the evil “other”. Although he’s actually of Puerto Rican/Italian descent, he’s played dozens of different minorities throughout his 45 year career. In this series of portraits, Silva is depicted in a variety of roles: Mr. Moto (the Japanese crime-lord), Chunjin (the Korean Communist informant), Chink (the “half-breed” Native American gunslinger), Ray Vargo (the Italian mafioso), as well as a role he never played but could have, Sirhan Sirhan (the Palestinian Assassin). The series includes oil, and enamel paintings, which have been sanded, painted wet-in-wet, and stenciled, to suggest marbling, television static, melting, etc, that reference the transformation of one physical state into another.