Susan Magnus is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores impermanence, temporality, and the instability of memory. She engages with personal and cultural artifacts, repurposing and reconfiguring them to create photographs, sculptures, and works on paper that reflect on the ephemeral.
Magnus was born in New York and grew up on Long Island. She earned a Bachelor of Arts from Parsons School of Design in New York and a Master of Fine Arts from Mills College in Oakland, California.
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.
She 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.
Susan Magnus has been featured in group exhibitions at the CCS Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at the State University of New York, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, and the Oakland Museum of California, among other institutions across the United States. 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.