Susan Bee: Eye of the Storm, Selected Works, 1981-2023

Fredi Schiff Levin Lecture with the artist: Thursday, September 12 at 6pm

For over forty years, Bee has been stylistically experimenting in a variety of media and imagery while interpreting personal and cultural experiences.

A mélange of figurative and abstract comparisons—integrating text, film images, art history, feminism—result in a comprehensive body of work which reinforces her place in the Provincetown art colony.

Curator Johanna Drucker writes: “Susan Bee has the wonderful distinction of being a painter of metaphors and symbols that invoke a host of associated meanings in which one thing stands for another. Her canvases are filled with these suggestive images, embedded in chains of substitutions and allusions that lead us from their apparent form into imaginative realms. The result is that her imagery escapes the narrow designations of figurative or representational art.”

The show is accompanied by a 68-page full-color catalog with essays by Johanna Drucker, John Yau, and Raphael Rubinstein. The catalog is available through the PAAM bookstore.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Susan Bee is an artist living in Brooklyn, NY and summering in Provincetown, MA. She has had eight solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery, NY and solo shows in Southfirst Gallery and Accola Griefen Gallery in NY. She has a BA from Barnard College and an MA in Art from Hunter College. Bee has also had solo shows at the University of Pennsylvania, Kenyon College, Columbia University, William Paterson College, the New York Public Library, and Virginia Lust Gallery, and her work has been included in numerous group shows. Her work has been featured at AMP Gallery and Artstrand Gallery in Provincetown. Bee has published eighteen artist’s books. She has collaborated with poets including: Susan Howe, Charles Berstein, Johanna Drucker, and Jerome Rothenberg. Bee is the coeditor with Mira Schor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings, Theory, and Criticism, Duke University Press, 2000, and the coeditor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online. Her artist’s book archive and the M/E/A/N/I/N/G Archive are at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Bee’s artwork is in many public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College. Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Getty Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Bee’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, The  New York Times, The New Yorker, ArtNews, The Brooklyn Rail, Artcritical, ArtSlant, The Forward, Huffington Post, Art Papers, and Hyperallergic. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts in 2014 and has had fellowships at the Macdowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. Bee has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Visual Arts, and Pratt Institute.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Johanna Drucker is Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor Emerita in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. Recent work includes Inventing the Alphabet (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Visualization and Interpretation (MIT Press, 2020), and Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist (Johns Hopkins University Press 2020), Digital Humanities 101: An introduction to Digital Methods (Routledge, 2021). Her artist’s books are widely represented in museum and library collections and were the subject of a traveling retrospective, Druckworks: 40 Years of Books and Projects, in 2012–2014.

This exhibition is sponsored in part by Seamen’s Bank.