Susan Newmark
I grew up absorbing the message that girls should be pretty, polite, proper, and defer to males. The expectation was to conform; my response was to withdraw. I yearned for a female role model and was attracted to the line drawings in daily newspapers and comic books. Wonder Woman was a figure of strength, wisdom, courage, an empowered warrior for peace equipped with magical garments. Her multicultural incarnations are icons that appear frequently in my mixed media work on paper. While all still struggle, they are confident, fierce in their resolve and resistance, and equally equipped to rule the world.
Work on paper and unique artists books by Susan Newmark explore social concerns, place, memory and nature by integrating collage, paint, photo imagery and layered fragments from popular culture. She’s had ten solo exhibitions and has been included in group shows at the Brooklyn Museum, the Parrish Museum, recently at the Center for Book Arts, (Walt Whitman’s Words: Inspiring Artists Today):Established Gallery (Continuum), and Figureworks Gallery, (20 at 20). Newmark has had residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Lower Eastside Printshop, the Womens Studio Workshop, and Byrdcliff, and is in various collections and received grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council. She was Director for the Visual Arts at Abrons/Henry Street Settlement and curated The Storyteller: Olivia Beens, a retrospective at El Barrio Artspace, The Book as Art at Lehman College, and Dialogues for the Visual Arts, an artists’ conversation series at Tribeca Performing Arts Center and the Grand Army Plaza Library.
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