Susan Magnus is a visual artist who engages with personal artifacts and material culture to create projects that examine themes of impermanence and temporality. She uses a broad range of materials to continuously expand a body of work that includes sculpture, photography, drawing, printmaking, works on paper, and installation.
Susan Magnus (b. 1957, New York, NY) earned a BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York and an MFA from Mills College in 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. 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 the 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.