Silver Stories is a hauntingly poetic, genre-defying narrative by visionary artist Micaela Amateau Amato. Experimental “diasporic conversations” merge vivid storytelling, personal history, political rage, and 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 visual art, Amato’s narrative is deeply rooted in her Sephardic-Mizrahi heritage and diasporic experience. The stories unfold in layers—like palimpsests on the walls of time—inked in metaphorical silver.
The book is richly 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
“Amateau Amato’s work ushers us back to raw experience — ecstasy, despair, exhaustion, pain, dignity, persistence, a hybrid presence that verges on the visceral – a wisdom that feels like real, primal strength.”
Leah Ollman
“Amateau Amato combines the Andalucian Arabic poetic concept of casida and the Catalan rauxa y seny…a balance of contradictions of austerity and fecundity that bears the naked shiver of emotion.”
Dr. Robert Rosenblum
“Amateau Amato’s show was breathtaking. Paintings were absolutely luscious…Folding ribbons of color made for a remarkable way of transforming the long, gestural brushstroke into something more like the curling forms of a nautilus shell or shed skin of an insect.”
Dr.Sarah K.Rich
Micaela Amateau Amato is a visual artist, curator, and writer.
Growing up in New York, she gained recognition in the 1970’s through the 1990’s in NYC, Chicago, and Los Angeles 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 NYTIMES, LATIMES, ARTFORUM, and Art in America, she has received several National Endowment for the Arts Awards and a Pollock Krasner Award. She illustrated the critically acclaimed 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.
Amateau is distinguished Professor Emerita from Pennsylvania State University. She resides in Boalsburg, Pa with her husband, sculptor Don Schule.