Susan Ossman

Artist Statement

I am an artist, a scholar and a writer. Movement fascinates me. How does a gesture change it’s meaning using a brush or a hand or in a new location? A texture? A shadow? I love to work with unlikely mixtures of materials as a way of thinking and working through emotions. Painting is often sensual and contemplative for me. Words can flow. Silk can develop sharp edges. My style is lyrical, emotional, and vibrant across media and genre. This poetic disposition is related to my life story.

I studied abstract expressionism as a student at Berkeley then became an anthropologist while living in Paris and Casablanca. I have since shown my work and performed in galleries and museum settings in the US, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. I also bring my projects to streets and fields, malls and public plazas to spur public experiences and discussions.

I often associate ethnographic fieldwork and artistic practices to develop projects that include art and writing and individual and collaborative moments. I find that creative project design and sustained research create frameworks for meaningful for improvisation and experiment, when I’m alone in the studio or working on a group exhibition or performance.

In 2013, I made my solo exhibition on the theme of laundry a springboard to develop “On the Line.” The three-year long, NEW funded program brought local and international artists together across Riverside to develop exhibitions and events that explored labor, gender, environment, class and ethnicity by way of clotheslines. In 2013, I started "The Moving Matters Traveling Workshop", a mobile, global community of serial migrant artists. We have since developed major exhibitions, performances and public interventions in major museums like Amsterdam's Hermitage, but also tourist sites like the Berlin Wall Museum and ordinary public plazas across Europe and the US.

My current projects include “Gather Wood/ Gather Words,” focused on work in the fields or office that t “goes up in smoke,” “Aftermaths,” for which I paint the lingering affecting, shadows left by events or encounters, and the “Poppy Project” that ,works from the evanescent flower to investigate the edge of dreams and addictions, the thin line of legality and the social and symbolic fallout of thinking that banishes beautiful poppies from grain fields as unproductive “weeds.”

My new book, "Shifting Worlds, Shaping Fieldwork, A Memoir of Anthropology and Art" will be published by Routledge in Fall 2020..