Susan Harris
Susan Harris is co-president of the Board of the International Association of Art Critics, United States section (AICA-USA). She is an independent scholar and curator. Her most recent project is Managing Editor, Unfinished Memories: 30 Years of Exit Art, Steidl, 2016.
Guest Critic
Recalling the Saints
By Susan HarrisAs serious, trained professionals who care deeply about art and artists, and place a high value on the disciplines of art history and art criticism, we regularly reflect on the role of the art writer/critic—what it is today and what it should be in a rapidly changing art world.
In Conversation
BRAD KAHLHAMER with Susan Harris
Brad Kahlhamer speaks with Susan Harris about how he got his start in the art world, his working relationship with the Heard Museum, and his multi-discipline practice.
In Conversation
Kiki Smith with Phong Bui and Susan Harris
On the occasion of the traveling retrospective Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980–2005, the artist’s first full-scale survey (on view until February 11, 2007), Kiki Smith welcomed Rail publisher Phong Bui and independent curator/writer Susan Harris to her home and studio to discuss her life and work.
RALPH HUMPHREY
By Susan HarrisRalph Humphrey’s exhibition at Gary Snyder Gallery illustrated his unique contribution to American abstract painting. In contrast to the metaphysical aspirations of the Abstract Expressionist painters whom he admired when he arrived in New York in the late 1950s, Humphrey’s territory was secular and nonspiritual.
Howardena Pindell: Autobiography
By Susan HarrisThe “Autobiography” series came about after a near fatal crash in which Pindell sustained severe injuries and memory loss. Early works from this series on view at Garth Greenan bear witness to the artist literally and figuratively piecing together fragments of her past.
Susan Harris
on Leon Golub
It is a thrill to see Leon Golub’s in-your-face paintings on the brutalist walls of the Met Breuer. During his lifetime, American painter Leon Golub received little institutional recognition—particularly from museums in the US.
Nancy Spero: Un Coup de Dent
By Susan HarrisNancy Spero’s recent exhibition at Galerie Lelong reaffirms the artist’s status as a national treasure.
Harold Ancart: Traveling Light
By Susan HarrisHarold Ancart is a Belgian-born, New York-based painter who seems to have catapulted into the limelight in recent years. His first one-person show at David Zwirner in New York fills two of Zwirner’s adjacent 19th Street locations with large, dazzling paintings, all created in 2020, that provide ample opportunity to consider his contribution to the recent reappearance of a familiar conversation concerning painting.
James Luna: Take a Picture with a Real Indian
By Susan HarrisJames Luna:e a Picture with a Real Indian is a posthumous installation at Garth Greenan Gallery of a performance/installation originally commissioned by the Whitney Museum’s downtown branch in 1991. The piece takes on issues of Native American identity and stereotypes, and explores how they land in largely non-Native spaces of viewing and writing about art.
Ursula von Rydingsvard
By Susan HarrisUrsula von Rydingsvard’s commanding new sculptures in natural, rough-hewn cedar are captivating in their correspondences to and departures from the awe-inspiring and warmly welcoming works that have defined her thirty-year oeuvre.
Kate Shepherd: Surveillance
By Susan HarrisSurveillance marks a vast leap in a new direction. Working on, experimenting with, and percolating this new body of work for years, Shepherd dug deep into her self and her process to figure out how to make paintings that would essentially make themselves instead of her superimposing images on them.
Alain Kirili: Who’s Afraid of Verticality?
By Susan HarrisEntering Alain Kirili’s exhibition, Who’s Afraid of Verticality, is like joining a gathering of benevolent beings in a space that lifts one’s gaze and spirit.
Pat Steir: Color Wheel
By Susan HarrisSpanning nearly 400 linear feet, this body of work took ten months to realize and represents Steir’s largest painting installation to date.
Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds: Standing Rock Awakens the World
By Susan HarrisHis artworks create opportunities for contemplation, reassessment and, hopefully, healing for Native and non-Native people alike.
In Conversation
JUDITH STEIN with Susan Harris
Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art
You’ve done a beautiful job, a great service to us all in bringing to light so much valuable information on this quiet visionary, Dick Bellamy, who, by your account, was unintentionally drawn to, and pinpointed artists who went on to speak to and define a whole generation.
