Susan Magnus engages with personal artifacts, archives, and material culture to create photo-based projects and sculptures that explore impermanence, temporality, and the instability of memory.
Susan Magnus earned an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California, and a BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York City. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, the Mills College Art Museum at Northeastern University, and the Oakland Museum of California. Her work is also held in distinguished corporate collections, including the Bank of America Corporation, the Microsoft Corporation, and the Oracle Corporation. Magnus is the recipient of a Regional Fellowship from the Western States Arts Federation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Visual Arts Award from the Gerbode Foundation. Her most recent solo exhibition, Imageafter, was presented at Garrison Art Center in Garrison, New York, where she served as the 2024 Visiting Artist, a program supported by the Putnam Arts Council and the New York State Council on the Arts. She currently lives and works in Beacon, New York.