Biography

Susan kae Grant is an inventive and influential lens-based artist, educator, and early proponent of photographic book arts. Her work is collected and exhibited in museums, galleries and private collections.

With an interest in art and science, Grant uses the shadow as metaphor to create fabricated narratives that explore dreams, memory and the unconscious.

Grant has a long history of presenting lectures, workshops and exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally, including the United States, Canada, China, Europe, Australia, British Columbia, Africa, Guatemala, and Japan.

In 2018 she was named Cornaro Professor of Visual Art, Emerita at Texas Woman’s University where she served as head of Photography & Book Arts from 1981-2017.

Gallery Representation
Contact Conduit Gallery | Dallas, Texas

Creative Practice

Grant’s innovative studio practice and distinct personal vision represent one of the mediums more sustained and recognizable contributions to fabricated photography and book art.

Her ongoing touring immersive installation of Night Journey and her curated exhibition Photographic Book Art in the United States have traveled to over 30 venues between them.

Her limited edition artists’ books include Radioactive Substances, a tribute to Marie Curie for the Smithsonian Institution, and Shadowed Memory, created at the Visual Studies Workshop when she was artist in residence.

To create the images in her current series Night Journey, she photographs shadows of constructed scenarios with models and props in her Dallas studio using a 4x5 view camera with a digital Leaf back. The gestures and narratives in the images take inspiration from sleep laboratory research, dream recordings, memory and journal sketches.

The final print works are limited edition photographs printed on Hahnemüle 308 Rag, a 100% cotton museum-quality paper.

Click here to see a video documentation of a set being created in the studio.

Selected Publications & Public Collections

Public Collections representing Grant’s limited edition photographs and book-works include:

• Arts of the Book Collection, Yale University

• Boston Athenaeum,

• Center For Creative Photography

• Columbia University

• Eastman Museum

• Houston Museum of Fine Arts

• J. Paul Getty Museum

• Kresge Art Museum at Michigan State University

• Minneapolis Institute of Art

• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

• New York Public Library Spencer Collection

• Smithsonian Institute

• Tokyo Photographic Museum

• Victoria & Albert National Art Library

• Wellesley College

Education & Book Arts 

Grant holds an MFA & BS in Photography & Books Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The research for her 1979 MFA exhibition focused on the staged narrative in photography and artists’ books incorporating imagery and handset letterpress type on handmade papers.

As an undergraduate she established The Black Rose Press imprint which has since produced twelve limited edition artists’ books on a broad range of subjects from feminist issues, identity, and gender politics to science, animal welfare, and autobiographic concerns.

Teaching Career

From 1981-2017, Grant served as Head of Photography & Book Arts at Texas Woman's University where she developed nationally recognized undergraduate and graduate programs. In 2018 she was named Cornaro Professor of Visual Art, Emerita.

Grant’s first teaching position was at Wayne State University in Detroit Michigan (1979-1980). Throughout her career she received numerous teaching awards and held a number of visiting faculty positions at the following institutions:

• Harlaxton College, Grantham,
  Lincolnshire, UK (Fall Session 2015)

• The Chicago Art Institute
  (Summer sessions 1986 & 1987)       

• S.U.N.Y. Buffalo
  (Summer Session 1982)

• The University of New Mexico- Albuquerque (Summer Session 1978)

Each spring since 1993, Grant has presented her 4-day workshop, The Art of Photographic Bookmaking, exclusively to the students in the Creative Practices One-Year Certificate Program at the International Center of Photography in New York City.

As an active member of the photography and book arts community, Grant served on the executive board of the Society for Photographic Education and as juror and curator of numerous exhibitions.

A selection of her curatorial projects include the traveling exhibitions, Photographic Book Art in the United States and The Book Reconfigured, a survey of women book artists residing in Texas.