Susan Magnus (b. 1957, New York, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist who creates photography, sculpture, works on paper, and installations that explore the ephemerality of the animate and the inanimate.
Her earliest projects found their genesis in memories of visiting ethnographic and natural history museums. While a sense of wonder was conjured by the diverse and idiosyncratic exhibitions she experienced, the preservation of things within the context of these institutions also evoked darker thoughts regarding the fragility of life and the futility of the curators’ efforts. Moreover, the organizing principles used within the museums often inadvertently revealed 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 inspired by an archive of photographs and artifacts she inherited after the cognitive decline and death of her mother. Reflecting on these materials, she found the vulnerability of the pre-digital snapshots to be emblematic of the fleeting nature of memory and the inevitable loss of loved ones we all experience. Moreover, she discovered her mother’s collection of heirlooms and objects had become not just a repository of recollection but an insistent reminder of the fugitive nature of all things. Exploring this residue from the landscape of her mother’s life began as a way for the artist to process grief and past events but quickly developed into a new and on going body of work in which she reconfigures, manipulates, and transforms appropriated pictures and possessions to create alternative, enigmatic visual narratives.
Work by Susan Magnus is represented in museum collections, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; the Oakland Museum of California; and the Mills College Art Museum. She is the recipient of a Regional Fellowship from the Western States Arts Federation and the National Endowment for the Arts; a Jack and Gertrude Murphy Fine Art Fellowship from the San Francisco Foundation; and a Visual Arts Purchase Award from the Gerbode Foundation. Magnus has exhibited her work at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; the Mills College Art Museum; the Oakland Museum of California; the CCS Hessel Museum of Art; and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. She received a BFA degree from Parsons and The New School in 1980 and earned a MFA from Mills College in 1992. A former longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she now lives and works in Beacon, New York.