Susan Magnus is a multimedia artist who creates photographs, sculptures, works on paper, and installations that explore themes of ephemerality.
Visits to ethnographic and natural history museums served as inspiration for her earliest projects. While the diverse and unique exhibitions found in these institutions often elicit a sense of wonder, the preservation of artifacts and specimens also evokes darker thoughts regarding the fragility of life and the futility of the curators’ efforts. In addition, the organizing principles of the exhibitions often inadvertently reveal presumptions of hierarchy regarding species and culture. The dichotomies of reverence and disregard, beauty and decay, found within these institutions continue to inform her work.
Magnus’s most recent projects are created in response to photographs, film negatives, and artifacts she inherited after her mother’s cognitive decline and death. Reflecting on these materials, she found the vulnerability and deterioration of the analog snapshots emblematic of the fleeting nature of memory and the inevitability of loss. Moreover, objects from the landscape of her mother’s life—some pristine, others in disrepair—were not only a source of remembrance but insistent reminders of the fugitive nature of all things. Initially, exploring this familial archive was a way to process grief and past events; over time, it has compelled her to transform images and objects into works of art that explore impermanence, absence, and the residue of personal and collective narratives we leave behind.
Magnus earned a BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York, NY, and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA. She is the recipient of a Regional Fellowship for Visual Art 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 work is included 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; and the Oakland Museum of California. Her most recent solo exhibition, Imageafter, was presented at the Garrison Art Center in Garrison, NY, 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.