Suzanne Benton, “First Day,” 2022
Sheffer Gallery
October 27, 2023, through January 8, 2024
Reception: November 1, 6-8 pm (reception: 6-7 pm; talk: 7-8 pm)
Suzanne Benton is a native New Yorker based in Connecticut for 64 of the 70 years she’s practiced her many-faceted art. Her pioneer dedication to feminism and activism has long carried her outreach beyond the borders of home.
The first year of world travel (1976-77) purposely coincided with Women’s International Year. It was then that she began the life pattern of bringing her metal mask making, mask performances, and workshops worldwide. That seminal journey to 14 countries led to decades of grants and invitations that fostered her learning and development as a trans-culturalist artist, highly recognized metal masquer, performer, printmaker, painter, lecturer, and workshop leader. Those opportunities brought her to 32 countries, East and West, and included a Fulbright lectureship in India, multiple artist residencies, generous support from colleges and universities, and frequent hostings by the cultural arm of U.S. embassies. Those amazing times gave a global awareness that’s greatly influenced her life and art.
Suzanne’s exhibitions include more than 200 solo shows, and her artwork is represented in museum and private collections worldwide. The mask tale performances that began at Lincoln Center in 1971, subsequently brought her to Elliot Hall’s 7,000-seat theatre at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana; Merrick Theater, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Harvard University Graduate School of Education; Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH; America Haus, Köln; Bosnian television, Sarajevo; India International Center, New Delhi; Bombay Center for the Performing Arts, India, and on.
Author of The Art of Welded Sculpture and numerous articles, Suzanne is and has been listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in American Art, and Feminists Who Changed America 1963-1975, edited by Barbara Love, 2006. In April 2023, Suzanne received a Lifetime Recognition Award from the Women’s Caucus of Art, Florida.
An upcoming exhibition from March 10 to May 5, 2024, Suzanne Benton: Unmasked will show a selection from her large oeuvre of welded metal masks and monoprints with Chine collé. It will be exhibited at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut.
The artist’s current direction, All About Color follows decades of intertwining color, shape, and imagery in distinctive monoprints with Chine collé. Those lengthy visits to India and Bangladesh brought in the palette of South Asia. Kenya, Tanzania, and Morocco taught her unique color juxtapositions. Suzanne is now casting such sun filled worlds into paintings of cosmic realms and unknown worlds.
All About Color Artist Statement
In this ninth decade of life, and as a working artist for nearly 70 years, I’d become interested in the concept of Late Style as described by the literary theorist Edward Said. “Each of us can supply evidence of late works, which crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor.” Matisse had it with his renowned paper cuts. While nearly blind, Monet created water lily paintings as his final legacy to the history of art.
My Late Style arrived as a surprise during the Covid pandemic. Sheltering in place ushered in an uncanny level of solitude that only painting could voice. Reaching for the purist of colors, I entered a world of Neo-Transcendentalpaintings large and small that I call All About Color.
The disappeared narrative came as a surprise. The imbedded image had been a mainstay in decades of monoprints and paintings. My welded steel and bronze masks and mask tale performances rely on character and story to amaze an audience. This time, I’m speaking of the inner life from a time of stillness that’s since stayed on.
I’d been well educated in color by John Ferren, the abstract expressionist painter who’d taught the year’s color study at Queen College. That sensitivity developed further through four art-working journeys in India: 1976-1977, 1992-1993, 1995, and 2011, and during the Bangladesh residencies of 1995 and 2011. Countries in Africa also gave my work unique juxtapositions of colors never found in Connecticut seasons.
All About Color began in Florida on the hopeful day of President Biden’s safe inauguration. Florida is also where walks along the beach, its sun on the water, flora and fauna, and even its cooing doves remind me South Asia and Africa. Here’s a long-ago memory from December 1976 when daughter Janet and I were in Puri on the Bay of Bengal. Staying at a hotel from the Raj period that was situated atop a hill from the beach, we took a mid-morning walk along the beach, and then rested in a bamboo hut where the sun came through its weave and cast warm shadows on Janet’s face. The next month took us to Varanasi where we hired a boat and boatman to take us along the Ganges River. It was noon. The heat and extreme contrast of the sun on the water was surreal, as much was, especially during that first time in India. Being in the presence of total poverty, uncanny splendor, and fantastical ancient sites gave an otherworldly strangeness that completely upended any previous sense of reality.
While each of the 32 countries where I’ve worked and traveled has given immeasurable impetus and richness to my art, there was something ineffable about India that drew me back. During the second journey, this time on a Fulbright, I recounted to friends what the guide book said, “Nothing prepares you for India, even if you’ve been there before.” Nevertheless, India became a country I knew to return, but never knew why. I now know that I’d gone again and again to finally arrive at All About Color, the painting series that’s freshening the ninth decade of my life.
Edward Said had added that difficult works also come late in artistic careers, works that “reopen questions”. To this, I’m thinking it’s not only the silence from the time of Covid that’s led to these recent works, or even what India had given me. There are the reflections that come with age, that bring in the weave of a lifetime’s journey and the whispering voice of mortality.
