Watershed Globe Project: Susanna Crum
August 29-December 19, 2020
Sally Newkirk Gallery
The Watershed Globe Project uses drawing, printmaking, animation, and sculpture as tools to examine maps of the Ohio River from 1793 to 2019. From European settlers to Google Maps developers, cartographers make a series of choices when drawing a map. As the artist re-drew these maps layer by layer, she charted the ways that waterways, railroads, and roads were represented over time. What can we learn if we read a map as a reflection of social relationships, values, or ideas? A multitude of users continuously update the maps we use today. How do maps inform our sense of a place?
About cyanotype:
Popularly used in the 19th and 20th centuries as a method for scientific illustration and urban planning, the cyanotype printing process requires a lensless photographic exposure and creates a complex range of rich blues, which vary based on the amount of time they are exposed to light.
About Susanna Crum:
Susanna Crum conducts research-led projects that investigate maps and printed ephemera as social artifacts at the intersection of past, present, and future. With cyanotype, lithography, video, and sculpture, Susanna merges digital and analog technologies and emphasizes print media’s roles in maintaining relationships – and erasures – between people and place. Her multilayered images combine community-based research with archival materials like letters, maps, newspapers, and oral histories, and propose an interpretation of place in which past and present are concurrent and vital.
Susanna received her MFA and MA in Printmaking with minors in Sculpture and Intermedia from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, and her BFA from the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Her work has been featured in international and national exhibitions at venues such as Museu do Douro in Portugal; Nicole Longnecker Gallery in Houston, TX; 1078 Gallery in Chico, CA; Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center in Cincinnati, OH; the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft in Louisville, KY; and the Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai, China. Recent artist residencies include Kunstnarhuset Messen, Ålvik, Norway; Mildred’s Lane, Beach Lake, PA; Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2016, and Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA, 2017.
Susanna returned to her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky to start the city’s first shared printmaking workspace, Calliope Arts Printmaking Studio & Gallery, with fellow artist and partner Rodolfo Salgado. Since 2015, she has taught printmaking as an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Southeast, New Albany, IN, and as the Associate Director of Calliope Arts. From 2018-2020, she will serve as President of the Mid America Print Council.