Larry Silver | California Dreamin'

Bruce Silverstein Gallery is pleased to present an exclusive online exhibition of Larry Silver’s iconic body of work, Muscle Beach. Silver arrived at the Art Center School in Los Angeles after earning a full scholarship in 1953, and after winning first prize in the Scholastic-Ansco Photography Awards during his senior year at High School of Industrial Art in New York City. Photographing the boardwalk locals, weightlifters, and performers, Silver candidly captures the entertainment, energy, and spectacle of the vibrant coastal neighborhood during the mid-century era, a thriving cultural moment in a burgeoning California. Muscle Beach has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography (1985), and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1999).

Silver has had several solo and group exhibitions across international institutions including International Center of Photography, New York; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Delaware Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Tampa Museum of Art, Florida; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; National Museum of Chinese History, Beijing; and The Jewish Museum, New York.

Silver’s work is held in over 25 museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Smithsonian Art Museum, Washington D.C.; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Houston Museum of Fine Arts; Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut; and the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.

Silver’s decades of photographs have been the subject of numerous books and catalogues including Made in California (2000); New York, Portrait of a City (2010); This Was the Photo League (2001) and Suburban Visions (2002). Silver currently lives and works in Connecticut.