Susan Spencer Crowe
Susan Spencer Crowe has worked in a variety of disciplines—sculpture, painting, and printmaking. She has exhibited widely in the Hudson Valley region and in New York City where she lived for nearly 40 years before moving to Kingston, New York in 2005.
Recent one-person shows include Susan Spencer Crowe: Recent Paperworks the Art Space at the Pine Hill Community Center in Pine Hill in 2018, Fractured Surface(s): Paperworks by Susan Spencer Crowe at the Foundation Gallery at Columbia Greene Community Gallery in Hudson in 2018 and Cuts and Folds: Susan Spencer Crowe at The Painters Gallery in Fleischmanns in 2016.
Most recently, her work was included in the following a group exhibitions in the Hudson Valley, including The Sum of All Parts, curated by Kristen Rego at the Mildred Washington Gallery at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie and Putting It Together, curated by Alan Goolman at The Lockwood Gallery in Kingston, the 2020 Annual Exhibition of Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region, juried by Susan Cross, Senior Curator at MASSMOCA for the Albany Institute of History and Art in Albany, and the first Kingston Annual 2020 juried by Julie Hedrick at the Art Society of Kingston.
Crowe is the recipient of two Artist Fellowship awards in sculpture from the New York Foundation for the Arts, named the Lily Auchincloss Foundation Sculpture Fellow in 2001 and received the 2018 Kuniyoshi Fund Award from the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum.
Recently retired from the Studio Art Program at Queens College in New York City after sixteen years of teaching and a long career as an arts administrator for many of the large and mid-sized cultural institutions in New York City such as The Jewish Museum, the Whitney Museum of America Art, and the New Museum. In the mid 1980s, she was the Executive Director of the Lower East Side Printshop. Crowe holds an MFA is Visual Art from Vermont College of Norwich University and a BFA with honors from Pratt Institute.
An American Girl
1991
screen print
edition: 30
image size: 21"h X 29"h
7 colors on Rives BFK
An American Girl represents the seemingly happy, well-dressed little girl growing up in America and seen as a model for the rest of the world. It was created during the summer of 1991 at an artist-in-residency program in upstate New York and inspired by the conversations that I had with fellow resident, Clarissa Sligh. We spoke extensively about our childhoods and how we saw our lives unfolding in a world that we only vaguely had a grasp on.
Based on a snapshot that my mother took of me on the first day of school in the mid-1950s, I then created a series of drawings of the same girl with her chest out and arms straight down by her side. Placed like a string of paper dolls across the page and in front of a map of United States, the “line-up” of these tense and stiff bodied little girls was intentional.
Standing at attention in front of the class and expected to perform in front of their classmates, a sense of anguish grips each girl as she withdraws behind the facade of her body. She agonizes over her performance and lack of social skills and awareness to effectively deal with her critics. Like many of my earlier prints, this piece was autobiographical in nature.
Susan Spencer Crowe 2023