about the artist
So often, when we talk about artists, we talk about their art as a separate entity but for Susan Grabel, art is an integral part of her life. She is a sculptor, printmaker, wife, mother, daughter, caretaker, museum educator, teacher, mentor, community activist, computer programmer and all of those experiences are reflected in her art. Her work is always about something, inextricably tied to the social and political narrative of the world around her. She takes to heart Alice Walker’s affirmation that “Activism is my rent for living on this planet.”. Her art has been described by Robert Bunkin, former curator at the Staten Island Museum, as “influenced by her generation of 1960’s activism and her family’s humanist values, with a goal of increasing our awareness of social issues and ultimately our compassion.
Grabel’s work has evolved organically from early clay urban vignettes to clay and wood environments exploring consumerism, homelessness, alienation and war, to handmade paper sculptures and collagraph prints on aging women’s bodies, to her work on Confluence— people coming together, embracing differences. Working with new technology at Staten Island Maker Space enabled her to digitally translate her prints and collages into various sized works in wood. Her pandemic Reflections was a continuation of that work using cast paper sculptures and digitally cut wood cutouts. After the death of her husband in 2024, Grabel began a series of meditations on loss and grief in cast paper and molded cardboard merging individual mourning with a broader sense of national loss.
Numerous galleries, universities, and museums across the country have exhibited her work which has been included in such important surveys of sculpture as In Three Dimensions: Women Sculptors of the '90’s curated by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Staten Island, NY, 1995 and Sculpture of the 70’s: the Figure at Pratt Manhattan Center, NYC in 1981.
Grabel’s work is included in numerous private collections as well as museums across the country including the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, CA, Canton Museum of Art, Canton, Ohio, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA, Figge Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa, Kruizenga Art Museum at Hope College, Holland MI, RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI, Rowan University Museum of Contemporary Art, Glassboro, NJ, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY, New Paltz, NY and the Staten Island Museum, Staten Island, NY.
Susan Grabel CV in pdf format