Susan Snodgrass
Chicago, IL
Nonfiction
Susan Snodgrass is a Chicago-based critic and editor. Much of her writing is devoted to alternative models of critical practice and art making, whether exploring new genres of public art or contemporary art in former Eastern Europe. She has written for both print and online publications, most notably for Art in America, for which she served as a Corresponding Editor (1994–2013), and ARTMargins Online, devoted to contemporary art in the global margins and for whom she is coeditor. She has contributed articles to numerous other periodicals, including most recently Textile: Cloth and Culture and THE SEEN. She is a 2018 recipient of a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her blog, In/Site: Reflections on the Art of Place, which explores art and urbanism, and a finalist for the 2019 Dorthea and Leo Rabkin Foundation Arts Journalist Award.
As an editor, she has worked with various organizations, artists, and writers in producing books and catalogs, including Industry of the Ordinary: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi (Chicago Cultural Center, 2012), Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave (WhiteWalls, Inc. and the Knoxville Museum of Art, 2010), Barbara Crane: Challenging a Vision (Chicago Cultural Center, 2009), and The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production (School of the Art Institute of Chicago and MIT Press, 2007).
Her current curatorial projects focus on the architecture of Ken Isaacs, and have been included in the exhibitions “Learning Modern,” at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Sullivan Galleries (2009-10), and the traveling “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia,” organized by the Walker Art Center (2015). Her book Inside the Matrix: The Radical Designs of Ken Isaacs is available at Half Letter Press.
Also an educator, Susan is a former Senior Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she taught in the New Arts Journalism Program and the Sculpture Department. She has taught writing workshops for artists through the University of Chicago Graham School, in partnership with the Hyde Park Art Center, and has instituted courses on the history of women artists and feminist art practice at DePaul University and Columbia College Chicago. She has also served as a mentor for the AICA Writing Workshop, part of the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program.