Susan Magnus (b. 1957, New York, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist who creates photographs, sculptures, works on paper, and installations that explore themes of ephemerality.
Reflections on visits to ethnographic and natural history museums served as inspiration for her earliest projects. While the diverse and unique exhibitions found in these institutions may evoke a sense of wonder, the preservation of artifacts and specimens within museums also evokes darker thoughts regarding the fragility of life and the apparent 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.
Her most recent projects are created in response to photographs, film negatives, and artifacts she inherited after the cognitive decline and death of her mother. Reflecting on these bequests, Magnus found the vulnerability and deterioration of the pre-digital snapshots emblematic of the fleeting nature of memory and the inevitability of loss. Moreover, her mother’s treasured objects—some pristine, others in disrepair—were not only a source of recollection but insistent reminders of the fugitive nature of all things. Initially, exploring this vernacular material allowed the artist to process grief and past events; over time, it inspired an ongoing body of work in which she appropriates and transforms pictures and possessions to create enigmatic, alternative visual experiences.
Magnus earned a BFA from Parsons School of Design and The New School in New York, NY, and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA. She has received regional fellowships from Creative West (formerly WESTAF) and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Jack and Gertrude Murphy Fine Art Fellowship from the San Francisco Foundation and a Visual Arts Purchase Award from the Gerbode Foundation. Her works are part of notable public collections, including the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley, CA; the Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; and the Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA. She has exhibited her work at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley, CA; the CCS Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY; the Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, NY. Her 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 resides in Beacon, New York.