Working primarily as a painter and occasionally a printmaker, Val Sivilli sometimes writes and illustrate stories. Val is an artist and adjunct professor of fine arts. Val attended 3 different Art Schools inside the SUNY system toward a BFA from Alfred University and earned her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers, New Brunswick, NJ. As a younger artist, Val lived in Brooklyn and worked in New York at Bob Blackburns Printmaking Workshop and spent 7 years as an assistant to Leon Golub and Nancy Spero. She exhibited extensively during that time. After Val moved to the Delaware Valley in the 1990’s to raise a family, she quickly became a community building local artist. She became the director and founding member of a local cooperative gallery called “STEAMROLLER, a home for not-so-local artists”, organized many art-driven fundraising events, as well as exhibiting extensively throughout New Jersey in solo exhibitions and group venues.
Around 2005, Val took a bit of a sabatical from formally exhibiting her paintings to regroup from a divorce, tend to her children and run her handprinted clothing and graphic design business Civilian Art.
In 2015, when those children successfully were thrust out into the world on their own, Val shuttered her business and spent 3 months at the Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico to reestablish her art making practice. Upon her return to Hunterdon County in 2016, Val founded THAT, The Hunterdon Art Tour, a county wide Artist Studio Tour in Western New Jersey which is currently in its 5th year. She created ‘The Civilian School of Art’, a virtual learning venue and most recently recently founded a new artist collective, STEAMROLLER GROUP. Val has been part of the adjunct faculty at at TCNJ, MGSA, RVCC where she is actively creating virtual artmaking tools and programs. Val continues to teach at Bucks County Community College and is currently developing accessible training in the foundations of visual arts through the lens of a formal credited art education.
Born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, she tends not to stray too far from the banks of the Delaware River on the west coast of New Jersey where you might find her playing the accordion somewhere.
Val Sivilli 