Research / Creative Activity
Application for Promotion and Tenure, 2020
Indiana University Southeast
Please note: this web page is best viewed on a desktop/laptop screen, rather than on a mobile device. On a computer screen, you will see a menu (at right) to navigate through the various sections. Thank you.
Guidelines for Promotion and Tenure
-
School of Arts and Letters - Guidelines for Promotion & Tenure (download PDF)
-
Indiana University Southeast Criteria for Promotion and Tenure (download PDF)
Biography
Susanna Crum received her MFA from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, and her BFA from 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, and Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA. Since 2015, she has taught printmaking as Assistant Professor of Fine Arts - Printmaking at Indiana University Southeast, New Albany, IN; and as the Associate Director of Calliope Arts, a shared printmaking workspace in Louisville, KY. She currently serves as President of the Mid America Print Council.
Statement of Research
“Maps, like other graphic conventions, construct normative notions about time, space, and experience that become so familiar we take them for accurate representations rather than constructions.”
Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production
I use print media, video, and sculpture as tools to investigate and interpret data from archival and community-based research. Historical and contemporary maps appear to be scientific or distanced from the societies they represent, but are a product of their place, time, and maker. They shape the social lives of places in ways that may go unnoticed but have a significant impact on economies, communities, and the environment. Printmaking processes like lithography, woodcut, cyanotype, and intaglio have long histories within mass media publishing and graphic art. Print media forged social contracts for image consumption that persist in digital media today. Borrowing the visual authority of maps, advertisements, and blueprints, I create multilayered views of specific places in which the past and present are concurrent and vital.
My work often combines digital and analog processes and techniques. Since 2017, my ongoing Alternative Maps project has explored the globe as an ephemeral printed object, a device for the distortion of landscape, and a tool to perpetuate sociopolitical relationships. Often out-of-date as soon as they are produced, a globe asks viewers to visualize the world not as an image on a screen or a flat abstraction, but at a fixed scale in relation to their bodies. Alternative Maps merges traditional globemaking techniques, printmaking processes like cyanotype, lithography, and woodcut, and digital tools like CNC devices and software. Working with traditional printmaking techniques allows me to connect to the social significance of the globe as a printed object in both concept and form. Using print processes allows me to merge visual languages from past and present, and facilitate conversations about the ways that yesterday’s words and images promote today’s social norms and historical erasures.
Research is central to my projects, and the development, presentation, and overall impact of my work is typically activated through collaborations with archivists, community leaders, and stakeholders. Because I typically make work about specific places, I facilitate community and civic engagement throughout each project. My collaborations with Tiffany Carbonneau engaged large, public audiences outside of the traditional gallery context. Collaborative workspaces play a significant role in my practice, such as Calliope Arts, which I co-founded with Rodolfo Salgado Jr in 2015 and Mildred's Lane, a 96-acre research space in Pennsylvania cofounded by J Morgan Puett and Mark Dion.
Collaboration is a pillar of my artistic and teaching practice. I spend a significant amount of time working with other artists to facilitate community and support through the practice of printmaking. This takes many forms, including collaborative publishing projects at Calliope and my university's publishing program Rolling Knob Press; artist residencies at studios in the US and abroad; panels and presentations with other artists; workshops and lectures at universities; and work as President of the Mid America Print Council. I work to promote roles and accessibility of print media and opportunities for students and practitioners who too often are met with socioeconomic circumstances that present challenges and barriers to a focused and sustained artistic practice.
Publications
Podcast conversation with Julie Lillie, "Mapping and Print: Perspectives from Contemporary Art and Art History." Conversations, College Art Association, New York, New York, United States. Submitted: August 20, 2019, Accepted November 1, 2019, published February 2020.
The College Art Association (CAA), as the preeminent international leadership organization in the visual arts, promotes these arts and their understanding through advocacy, intellectual engagement, and a commitment to the diversity of practices and practitioners.
Description: "With interviewer Robert Howsare, Susanna Crum and Julia Lillie present “Mapping and Print: Perspectives from Contemporary Art and Art History.” Susanna Crum, Assistant Professor at IU Southeast and President of Mid America Print Council, and Julia Lillie, a PhD Candidate at the Bard Graduate Center in New York and former Collections Manager in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, discuss historical and contemporary intersections between Lillie's studies of modern European print culture and Crum's creative research in collaborative printmaking studios and the politics and perspectives in mapmaking."
Cover image, Graphic Impressions, Southern Graphics Council International, Atlanta, GA, United States, vol Summer 2018, pp. Cover and page 7, 2 pages. Submitted: May 17, 2018, accepted July 17, 2018, published July (3rd Quarter/Summer) 17, 2018.
SGC International is an educational non-profit organization committed to informing our membership about issues and processes concerning original prints, drawings, book arts, and handmade paper. Significant dialogue and exchange of technical and critical information occurs each year at our annual conference, which draws participants nationally and internationally. Our awards, publications and exhibitions promote greater understanding, scholarship, and enjoyment of these art forms to the public at large.
“Brick by Brick: Creative Entrepreneurship After Graduation,” Mid America Print Council Journal, Vol. 23, p. 50. Feb 15, 2015 (author)
The Mid America Print Council Journal features articles on the contemporary and historical context of printmaking, works on/of paper, drawing and book arts; essays examining the critical theory related to these media; and reviews of exhibitions and publications.
Exhibitions
During the period of my work towards tenure and promotion at IU Southeast, I have exhibited my work in over 40 juried, invitational, solo and two-person exhibitions, at venues such as Museu do Douro in Douro, Portugal; Ross Art Museum in Delaware, OH; Nicole Longnecker Gallery in Houston, TX; 1078 Gallery in Chico, CA; Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center in Cincinnati, OH; and the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft in Louisville, KY. In 2017, I was the sole US artist awarded a Special Prize at Lessedra Art Gallery's 16th Lessedra World Print Annual, Sofia, Bulgaria. I have recently been awarded artist residencies and research fellowships at Kunstnarhuset Messen, Ålvik, Norway; Mildred's Lane, Beach Lake, PA; the Newberry Library, Chicago, IL; Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh, Scotland, and Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA.
In a juried exhibition, a venue will hire an arts professional from a prominent contemporary art institution or university program to review artist submissions and select artwork for an exhibition. I also feature my artwork in invitational exhibitions, which often result from meeting curators and gallery directors during travel, artist residencies, conferences, presentations, or studio visits.
One and Two-Person Exhibitions (two-person shows marked with asterisk*)
2020
Carnegie Center for Art and History, The Watershed Globe Project, New Albany, IN (forthcoming)
* Starfangled Press, Found Fictions, two-person exhibition with Rodolfo Salgado Jr., Brevard, NC
2019
* Kunstnarhuset Messen, Mapping Alvik, Ålvik, Norway
* Flat Tail Press Gallery, Found Fictions, two-person exhibition with Rodolfo Salgado Jr., Minot State University, Minot, ND
2018
Meijer Artway, Constellations, Indiana University East, Richmond, IN
2017
Ross Art Museum, The Shadows We Cast, architectural video projection in collaboration with Tiffany Carbonneau, Delaware, OH
* AAHD Gallery, Tracing a Line, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN
2016
1078 Gallery, A Collecting Place, Chico, CA
2013
Revelry Gallery, Fight or Flight, Louisville, KY
2012
Art Building West Gallery, The Heart of the Park, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
Juried and Invitational Exhibitions
2020
Mildred’s Lane Complex(ity), Silver-Iron-Light, Narrowsburg, NY (forthcoming/postponed)
Southern Graphics Council International Conference, Printilla, San Juan, Puerto Rico (forthcoming/postponed)
2019
Davis Gallery, The Worth of Water, Hobart and William Smith College, Geneva, NY
Kore Gallery, Printmaking at the Edge, Louisville, KY
Southern Graphics Council International conference, Ecological Connectivity: Trace (Mapping Space), University of Northern Texas, Denton, TX
Rozsa Center, Salon!, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI
2018
Visual Arts Gallery, Mid-America Print Council Members’ Juried Exhibition, Laramie, WY
Pacific Studies Gallery, Paper Connections: Works by Faculty and Students of Indiana University Southeast and the National University of Samoa, National University of Samoa, Apia, Samoa
Mildred’s Lane Complex(ity), The Mildred Complex(ity): From the Archives of Mildred’s Lane, Narrowsburg, NY
Grunwald Gallery, On Structure, collaborative work with Tiffany Carbonneau, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
Southern Graphics Council International Conference, Imaging Utopia: Blueprints for Intent and Dissent, Las Vegas, NV
Museu do Douro, 9th International Printmaking Biennial, Douro, Portugal
Kala Art Institute, Artists' Annual, Berkeley, CA
University Art Gallery, The Flat Object: Sculptural Prints & Installations, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN
2017
Morlan Gallery, MAP/PING, Transylvania University, Lexington, KY
Lessedra Art Gallery, 16th Lessedra World Print Annual, Sofia, Bulgaria. Juried by Kalli Kalde, Estonia; Anita Klein, England; Luce, Belgium; Jan Wellens, Belgium; Snezhina Bisserova, Bulgaria; and Grethe Hald, Norway. Awarded Special Prize.
Museu do Douro, 3rd Global Print 2017, curated by Nuno Canelas, Douro, Portugal
Nicole Longnecker Gallery, NEXT 2017: A Biennial of Contemporary Print, Houston, TX. Juried by Nancy Palmeri, Professor, MFA Director, and Assistant Chairperson of Art & Art History at University of Texas at Arlington (letter)
New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, Mercatus, curated by Garry Holstein, New Harmony, IN
Artlink Contemporary Gallery, 37th Annual National Print Exhibition, Fort Wayne, IN. Juried by Patrick Flaherty, president and executive director of the Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, IN (catalog)
New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, The Disseminator of Useful Knowledge, curated by Brett Anderson, New Harmony, IN
2016
Brick Street Gallery, A Bridge Between, in conjunction with the Mid-America Print Council conference, curated by Susan Harrison, New Albany, IN
Chicago Printmakers Collaborative, Cuts: An Exhibition of Relief Prints, Chicago, IL
City Gallery at Downtown Art Center, Beveled Edges – Printmaking in Kentucky, Lexington, KY
Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center, Memory Palace, Cincinnati, OH
2015
Carnegie Center for Art and History, Held from Beneath: An Exploration of Cultural Sustainability, New Albany, IN, Curator: Karen Gillenwater
2014
Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Press: Artist and Machine, Louisville, KY
Kentucky Derby Museum, Impressions: The Art of the Race, Louisville, KY, Curator: Dominic Guarnaschelli
Green Building Gallery, Print and Process, Louisville, KY, Curator: Daniel Pfalzgraf
Huff Gallery, Sustain Invitational, Spalding University, Louisville, KY, Curator: Joyce Ogden
Creative Research
Numerous grants totaling $24,680.00 have supported my research-based creative work, including two Summer Faculty Fellowships in Research from IU Southeast (2016 and 2018) and one Artist Professional Development Travel Grant from the Great Meadows Foundation. On-site research with historical archives and community historians is often the basis of my independent and collaborative artworks. In recent years my artwork has engaged the collections of the Industrial Workers’ Museum (Ålvik, Norway); Prelinger Archive (San Francisco, CA); Letterform Archive (San Francisco, CA); Wayne County Historical Society (Honesdale, PA); Delaware County Historical Society (Delaware, OH); Indiana Historical Society (Indianapolis, IN); the University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections (Edinburgh, Scotland); Filson Historical Society (Louisville, KY); and the University of Kentucky's Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History (Lexington, KY).
Each of my creative projects begin with a central research question. Their scope and subjects then grow and change as I research and investigate connections between seemingly disparate social phenomena, geography, material artifacts, and historical records. For internationally-recognized multimedia artist Mel Chin, art is a “catalytic structure” to create possibility and social change, and research is a fundamental first step in his creative process. In an article by Michael Agresta, Chin articulates a relationship between communication and research - and therefore, knowledge - in a way that particularly motivates my work. “It’s not about you as an artist changing the world.” Instead, “You need to understand that you have to do your homework and have a critical dynamic that’s going to enlarge the conversation to a degree where you are better informed.” Being on-site and working with archivists and community members allows me to discover surprising connections between materials and histories, shaping my approach to visual representations of data and history, and selecting artistic processes that serve as the best vehicle for content. After doing the necessary “homework” of research, my multilayered works in print, sculpture, and video ask further questions. How do geographical and schematic representations shape our communities? How does the selective process of historical preservation influence contemporary city planning, local identities, and social relationships? What about this history is not represented in the archive?
Architectural Video Projections
From 2016-2017, I created four collaborative architectural video projections with Tiffany Carbonneau, artist and IU Southeast Associate Professor of Fine Arts - Digital Art. These large-scale, research-based artworks have ranged in scale and scope from one-night events, to a six-week automated projection with a budget of $10,000.00. Through digital video and projection, community-based research, and public engagement, we engaged the past, present and future of specific sites. We used specialized software to map digital and analog imagery onto facades, activating the site and facilitating conversations about a place’s social history. By conducting historical investigations, archival research, and journalistic interviews, these works combined found and original digitized motion picture film, imagery, and text to create layered visual narratives that highlight intersections between a space’s past and present, and foster dialogue about its future.
In many cases, these projections highlighted histories that were lost or on the verge of being forgotten or replaced. Inside and Outside projected Homeowners’ Loan Corporation maps from the 20th century that we now call “redlining” - a federally-backed real estate practice that projected racist lending policies onto American cities. This projection took place in a neighborhood long underserved due to exclusionary redlining practices. A Running Loop projected the portraits and names of Black jockeys that won the first Kentucky Derby races, projected over the paddock and Jockey Club at Churchill Downs. A Place in Time displayed images and information about Black-owned businesses and society in the Indianapolis Canal district, projected onto a prominent A.M.E church and site on the Underground Railroad, which was about to close and become a hotel. After the lights of our projection went off, the church members, including the historian who we worked with closely on the project, handed their keys to the hotel owners. The Shadows We Cast projected images of postcards and letters from the region on a former US Post Office, exploring the role of postcards and highways as instruments for defining and promoting “the American Dream.”
About cyanotype:
In addition to traditional printmaking techniques like silkscreen, lithography, and woodcut, I often use the cyanotype process in my work. 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. My work often begins as ink or digital drawings based on collections of archival imagery from maps, artifacts, newspapers, schematics, and other commercial print media. The process of drawing these elements by hand and exposing them photographically results in a flattened visual space where images from very different eras and sources overlay and merge with one another.
Capriccio Series, 2015-2018
For centuries, prints have been a means to illustrate, define, and share scientific findings, political ideologies, and social actions. Maps and printed ephemera like newspapers, banknotes, and advertisements provide material evidence of the ways social frameworks and cultural norms are promoted and maintained. Printed currency, or bank notes, provide visual evidence of how nations represent their resources, people, landscapes, and histories. The handmade cyanotype “blueprints” in this series combine imagery from bank notes from countries around the globe. More information about recent works on paper here.
A Collecting Place, 2016
With cyanotype, lithography, woodcut, and silkscreen, A Collecting Place featured multilayered images that explore the past and present of Edinburgh's camera obscura attraction, which for more than 150 years has projected a 360-degree, live view of the city within a dark chamber. With its movable lens and glowing screen, the camera obscura continues to facilitate observation, contemplation, and playful manipulation of landscape, in a way that feels at once futuristic and ancient, public and private, introspective and voyeuristic.
A Collecting Place was supported by a Summer Faculty Fellowship in Research, an artist residency at Edinburgh Printmakers, the Camera Obscura and World of Illusions, Riddle's Court, Edinburgh, and Scottish Historic Buildings Trust.
Mapping Ålvik, 2019
During a residency in Norway, collaborating artist Rodolfo Salgado and I mapped the industrial and social anchors of a purpose-built environment established as a company town in the early 20th century. We interviewed local historians, factory workers, and residents in the rural fjordside town of Ålvik. Inspired by Renaissance-era maritime portolan charts, which were printed on animal skin and unrolled for shared use at sea, this is a map without an "up" or "down" orientation. Though all maps have a point of view, this record of historical and contemporary life in Ålvik can be turned and read from all directions.
I created the graphite drawings and cyanotypes (below) on Salgado’s handmade paper. They feature renderings of metallic byproducts of 20th-century ferrosilicon production, which often washed ashore outside the fjordside ferrosilicon plant and residency center.
This project was supported by a Great Meadows Artist Professional Development Grant and an artist residency at Kunstnarhuset Messen, Ålvik, Norway.
Current Body of Work: Alternative Maps (2017-present)
Printmaking’s potential for wide distribution and accessibility has played a major role in social activism, politics, and policy for centuries as broadsides, pamphlets, and posters. By making work that recalls the visual language of maps and schematic drawings, I create opportunities for conversation about the relationships between people and place. My approach utilizes print-based media as artifacts of social change, I propose an interpretation of place in which elements from the past, present, and future are concurrent and vital. Maps have long been a subject of my work, as they appear to be scientific or distanced from the societies they represent, but have in fact had a significant social impact from their very beginnings.
Despite their known social and physical distortions, printed maps have a continuing scholarly and cultural significance in our world today – for example, Gerhard Mercator’s 16th-century map projection is the basis for translating 3D space to easily-navigable 2D space used by Google Maps today:
Current studies, such as Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America— a collaboration between the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, and Johns Hopkins University—has created an interactive, web-based map that updates the study of federal government, housing and inequality for the 21st century. It offers “unprecedented online access” to the national collection of “security maps” and area descriptions produced, between 1935 and 1940, by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). These maps had a tremendous and long lasting social impact, helping “set the rules for nearly a century of real estate practice.” As they describe on their website, “Through offering a digital library of the state’s role in housing developing, Mapping Inequality illustrates vividly the interplay between racism, administrative culture, economics, and the built environment.” Using interactive, web-based media, the Mapping Inequality project utilizes historical maps to tell a story whose influence echoes in nearly all American communities today.
My current ongoing project, Alternative Maps, embodies a hybrid practice that combines digital and analog techniques from research and concept, to design and production. One might think cartography is a seemingly-antiquated field, often relegated to exploration and navigation. In fact, data mapping is an increasingly emerging field and practice for business, marketing, public policy, apps, and contemporary art. For example, companies like ESRI in Redlands, CA create geographic information systems (GIS), which combine data analytics and cartography to predict, manage, and record the flow of action and markets. With computer science and coding, 21st century cartographers like those at ESRI, extrapolate location data in nearly any subject matter or market. This inevitably has an impact on how communities in specific locations are served or underserved, included or excluded from growth and development. In contemporary art, the artist, geographer, and 2017 MacArthur Fellow Trevor Paglen’s practice makes “the invisible operations of military and corporate power visible to everyday citizens. He draws on his training as a geographer and utilizes the tools of image-making, coupled with painstaking review of public records and declassified documents, to explore infrastructures of warfare, surveillance, and social control that are generally hidden from the general public.”
I began Alternative Maps in the summer of 2017 with intensive research in materials, techniques, and processes in traditional globe-making methods dating back to the 15th century, as well as cutting-edge software and laser-cut tools. Beginning in June 2017, I researched historical and contemporary globemaking, including a 1757 treatise on equipment and processes by Denis Diderot, which outlined techniques for casting plaster spheres and attaching printed imagery, using software developed by NASA, and corresponding with contemporary artisanal globemakers, including Planetenkugel Manufaktur in Germany and Globe Sauter & Cie in Bensançon, France. Alternative Maps embraces the globe as a printed and ephemeral object, out-of-date as soon as they are produced. There is something performative and absurd about the process of making and showing them –asking viewers to interact with a map not on a screen but in three dimensions, in the social space of a gallery or other venue, with a fixed scale and relationship to their bodies.
I have been invited to present the ongoing Alternative Maps series in artist lectures at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY; Kent State University, Kent, OH; University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY; University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN; and Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN.
Alternative Maps: Handheld Utopias, 2017
The first iteration of this project, Handheld Utopias, was featured in three exhibitions in 2017-2018 including Tracing a Line, a two-person exhibition with Rachel Singel at the University of Notre Dame, and MAP/PING, a group exhibition at Morlan Gallery featuring artists and cartographers curated by Andrea Fischer. A print related to this series was on display in the 9th Douro Biennial 2018, Douro, Portugal. Another was featured in an international exchange portfolio I organized, Imaging Utopia: Blueprints for Intent and Dissent, which explores the role of the artist as an inventor of alternate realities, on display at the 2018 Southern Graphics Council International printmaking conference, Las Vegas, Nevada.
Project statement. For centuries, globes have signified power, education, and scientific inquiry, but are often out-of-date just after they are produced. Handheld Utopias explores the globe as an ephemeral printed object and a device for presenting (and distorting) spatial and political relationships. It features a borderless map of designs, patterns, and architecture from the banknotes of 195 countries, rendered as a three-dimensional cyanotype blueprint with traditional globe-building techniques and specialized software. In cartography, a projection is a rendering of three-dimensional space to two dimensions. From medieval shipping maps to Google Earth images, efforts to convey geographic relationships have been embedded with the privilege and perspectives of the map-maker, from relative scales of countries to international borders. The Handheld Utopias projections feature cyanotype blueprints that are distorted in such a way to conform to the spherical surface of a globe, and offer a fractured presentation of oceans and continents in a form we do not typically view as a flat map.
Alternative Maps: Watershed Globe, 2019
The most recent iteration in the Alternative Maps series, The Watershed Globe, was selected for display in two group invitational exhibitions in 2019: Salon! at the Rosza Gallery curated by Lisa Gordillo, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI; and the Worth of Water exhibition curated by Nicholas Ruth at Davis Gallery, Geneva NY. In the Worth of Water, I was excited to show my work alongside fellow exhibitor and recent Creative Capital grant recipient Cannupa Hanska Luger. Along with a new series of drawings from 2020, The Watershed Globe is a subject of a solo exhibition at Sally Newkirk Gallery, Carnegie Center for Art and History, New Albany, IN, opening in August 2020.
Project statement. 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 and 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?
Future Plans for Research
Alternative Maps is a series with a rich field of future opportunities and collaborations, particularly with contemporary cartographers and data mapping companies like ESRI (Redlands, CA) and Genscape (Louisville, KY), as well as historical archives and collections. I look forward to applying for grants and funding to collaborate with professional cartographers, exhibitions about intersections between art and technology, and residencies and fellowships (art-related and otherwise) that would enable me to access artifacts and collections pertinent to forthcoming iterations of Alternative Maps.
Curatorial Work and Presentations
My research includes scholarly and curatorial investigations on the social impact of historical and contemporary print media. I have chaired and participated in numerous panels on this subject. This includes a 2018 presentation at the Society for Utopian Studies conference, Berkeley, CA. At the March 2017 Southern Graphics Council International conference in Atlanta, GA, I served as panel chair on a discussion on the significance of appropriation of print media for cultural and sociopolitical critique in contemporary art. Titled Crossroads: Intersections and Interventions, the panel discussion featured presentations by two artists from the US and one from Australia.
The impetus for this panel discussion was an exhibition I curated from the collection of 21c Museum, titled Interventions: Re-Framing the Printed Image, which was on display in conjunction with the 2016 Mid-America Print Council conference. Curating exhibitions from artists and collections allows me to connect with emerging and professional artists, and interact with significant works of art by renowned contemporary artists such as Mark Dion, Kara Walker, and James Rosenquist, as well as historic prints by naturalist John James Audubon.
Calliope Arts: Platform for Collaborative Research and Publishing
In addition to my research-based artwork, I am committed to advancing print media scholarship on a local and national scale. Collaborating with other artists and scholars through publishing new editions of prints is an important part of my research. Through these projects, I learn new techniques, work in ways I otherwise wouldn’t, and develop new techniques and approaches. In 2012, I returned to my hometown, Louisville, KY, to start a cooperative fine art printmaking studio Calliope Arts with fellow printmaker Rodolfo Salgado Jr. In 2013, I was awarded the inaugural Mary Alice Hadley Prize for Visual Arts, which funded research and development for the studio.
Since 2015, Calliope Arts has provided facilities for relief, lithography, etching, and silkscreen, as well as classes, a visiting artist program and exhibitions by local and nationally-known artists. Since then, we have used our facilities and equipment to publish limited editions of artwork by artists like Caroline Woolard (New York, NY), Micah Bloom (Minot, ND), Sophie Radl (New Orleans, LA) and Douglas Degges (Storrs, CT). This kind of collaboration requires consulting with artists on a variety of techniques and processes, a longstanding practice at printmaking studios globally, such as Idem Paris, Paris, France; Tamarind Institute of Lithography, Albuquerque, NM; Crown Point Press, San Francisco; and Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, CA.
C19: Art Works for Kentucky
Since April 2020, Calliope Arts has been working on a large publishing project with 19 artists, writers, and musicians to publish open editions of prints in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. So far, we have donated over $1,400 to Artist Relief Trust, a state-wide coalition initiative led by ELEVATOR Artist Resource to provide emergency assistance to artists in Kentucky and Southern Indiana. Article by Steven Krolak on IUS Now, here.
Reviews of Creative Performances and Exhibitions
Presented below are reviews and interviews in two sections: “Exhibitions, Projects and Creative Research” and “Community-based work, Entrepreneurship and Leadership.” Both are pillars of my practice as a teacher-scholar. I rely on social connections and collaborations, across the US and abroad, to conduct my research-based artwork. I maintain roles as a leader, advisor, and mentor on local and national levels by mobilizing and connecting emerging and professional artists with resources like Calliope Arts, the Mid America Print Council, grants, and juried exhibitions. I share these reviews and interviews with my students via social media platforms and class discussions, in a transparent and open effort to empower them to consider roles as both beneficiary and provider after graduation: What do you need from the world to make your best work? What roles and platforms could benefit most from your passions, talents, and interests?
Exhibitions, Projects, and Creative Research
IUS Now, "Susanna Crum uses art and history to boost morale in Louisville", Steven Krolak, April 27, 2020
Excerpt: "Printed on canvas and pinned to a line in front of the couple’s studio, Calliope Arts, in the Smoketown neighborhood, the badges recall the resilience of past generations of Louisvillians to inspire the city’s inhabitants of today, who are coping with the global coronavirus pandemic."
WLKY News, "Creative Louisville duo spreads positivity using history", Andrew Chernoff, Louisville, May 7, 2020
WXOX 97.1 FM, "Printmaking Exhibition of Kentucky Artists", Dec 5, 2019
LEO Weekly, "STAFFPICKS: Extreme Prints: Printmaking At The Edge", Dec 10, 2019
IU Research Impact, "Expanding the creative process with digital tools", Oct 2019
A writeup of my work implementing a CNC (computer numerical controlled) router in my Printmaking courses supported by a 2019 Summer Faculty Fellowship in Teaching, as well as my creative research. Excerpt: "Crum wants to expand how students and other professional artists use digital tools in their creative processes. Her work demonstrates how the Shopbot CNC router can impact contemporary printmaking and how students and faculty can incorporate the router in the design of unique and innovative 2D and 3D artworks."
First Build, "Today’s spotlight is on local artist, Susanna from Calliope Arts print studio. She works with us to merge ancient print techniques with modern #cnc technology and dedicates the art back to the community,” Louisville, KY, April 18, 2019.
A video featuring an interview and documentation of my work with the CNC laser cutter at FirstBuild maker's space in Louisville, KY, where I created laser-cut wood blocks for relief printmaking at my studio, Calliope Arts. FirstBuild is a public maker’s space on the University of Louisville campus.
TV6, "“Historical art tradition open to public on MTU's campus”, Houghton, MI, Mar 6, 2019
Minot Daily News, "‘Found Fictions’ mixes the human body and art", Shyanne Belzer, Feb 27, 2019
A review of the two-person exhibition "Found Fictions" with Rodolfo Salgado Jr.
Excerpt: "Examining and exploiting the authority of the historical cartographer, Susanna Crum’s prints present questions on place, land ownership, and political boundaries. After deconstructing maps and globes, Crum graphically reassembles planet Earth without regard to national or state borders. Like the official voice of the architect’s blueprint, Crum’s maps emerge in the classic cyanotype, imbued with a new authority, suggestive to the imagination. As the prints draw in the eye, with the deep, rich blue, they quiet the mind for reflection on how and why humans have made boundaries."
College Art Association, "Mildred’s Lane, an Art Institute of Social Engagement”, Hovey Brock, Feb 14, 2019.
Hovey Brock wrote and presented this paper at the international CAA conference. Part of the panel discussion, Inhabit the World in a Better Way: Art between Political Practice and Relational Aesthetics, chaired by Kristopher Holland, University of Cincinnati and Sabine Flach, School of Visual Art, New York, NY.
IUS Now, "Fine Arts Faculty Biennial Exhibition celebrates spirit of experimentation", Steven Krolak, Oct 22,
2018
OWU News, “The Shadows We Cast,” Cole Hatcher, Columbus, OH, Sept 11, 2017
Excerpt from curator Erin Fletcher: “It’s really wonderful how many people were willing to get on board with this exhibit when they understood that it told a story shared by Delaware and Ohio Wesleyan,” she said, ticking off a list that includes colleagues at Ohio Wesleyan and representatives from the Delaware County Historical Society, City of Delaware, and Main Street Delaware, which plans to include the outdoor exhibition in its Oct. 6 First Friday celebration.
Columbus Dispatch, "Museum director Erin Fletcher puts art at center of discussion", Nancy Gilson, Columbus,
OH, April 9, 2017.
Director of the Ross Art Museum at Ohio Wesleyan University, Erin Fletcher, discusses museum programming, including the Inside/Outside series of projects. This series included commission of the collaborative architectural video projection, "Possible Futures," which I completed in collaboration with Tiffany Carbonneau in fall 2017.
Indianapolis Recorder, "Interactive Light Festival to brighten Indianapolis Downtown Canal," Aug 3, 2016
Chico News and Review, "The Artist as Anthropologist: Bridging Past, Present, and Future", Sacramento, CA,
Nov 3, 2016.
An interview and review of my solo exhibition A Collecting Place at the 1078 Gallery in Chico, California.
IUS Now, "Printmaker Susanna Crum exposes fractured history of segregation", Feb 17, 2016
An article based on an interview I had with Steven Krolak, IUS Academic Information Officer, about a recent artwork on display in a juried exhibition at the Manifest Creative Research Gallery in Cincinnati, OH. I spoke about my research-based projects and earlier work on an exhibition about cultural sustainability at the Carnegie Center for Art & History in New Albany.
Community-based work, Entrepreneurship and Leadership
WXOX 97.1 FM, "C19: Art Works for KY", July 10, 2020
I participated in an hour-long radio interview produced by Louisville Visual Art (LVA) on WXOX 97.1 FM, Louisville, KY. We discussed the C19 collaborative publishing project at Calliope Arts, which includes 19 visual, literary, and performing artists from the region and as of July 1 had raised over $1,200.00 to provide emergency relief funding to visual artists in Kentucky and Southern Indiana.
Louisville Metro TV, "C19: Art Works for KY", Nicole Lechniak, June 12, 2020
Aired on television and the internet, this video features an interview of Calliope Arts cofounders Rudy Salgado and Susanna Crum speak about the publishing project, "C19: Art Works for Kentucky," in which 19 artists are creating images for original lithographs, etchings, screenprints, and relief prints to support emergency relief funding for artists in Kentucky and Southern Indiana.
Visionspire, "Visionspire Artist Feature Series", Andrew Kung Photography, Oct 15, 2019
My studio Calliope Arts in Louisville, KY was selected for a "Visionspire" interview, an invitational feature of visual artists and creative entrepreneurs in the region. Videographers from Andrew Kung Photography came to the studio and interviewed Calliope cofounder Rudy Salgado and me about our artistic practices and the community-based studio we founded in 2015.
IUS Now, "Susanna Crum to Lead Mid America Print Council", New Albany, IN, Oct 12, 2018
An article about my recent election as President of the Mid America Print Council for 2018-2020, a national nonprofit organization of professional artist printmakers and educators.
Excerpt: “'A focus area of my teaching at IU Southeast is modeling for students the many ways to be an artist after graduation,' Crum said. 'Connecting them with other creative practitioners, both peers and professionals, is a crucial part of this effort.'"
For Good: Louisville's Philanthropy Magazine, "Supporting Our Creative Community", Elizabeth Kramer, Louisville, KY, Oct 8, 2018
I discuss the ways I share strategies for entrepreneurship and grant-writing in my teaching at IU Southeast, as well as the work I do to support and advise professional and emerging artists.
WXOX 97.1 FM, "2018 Hadley Prize Opportunity", Mar 15, 2018
Hour-long interview broadcast on ArtxFM radio station (97.1 FM) with Ramona Lindsey of the Community Foundation of Louisville. We discussed the Hadley Prize for Visual Art, an annual $5,000.00 grant given to one artist in the Louisville Metro area (including Floyd, Harrison, and Clark counties). I was the inaugural recipient of the award in 2013 and have also been a juror for the Prize.
Artspace.com, "Destination: Louisville, Kentucky - An Art-Lover's Guide," Artspace Editors, Oct 17, 2017
LEO Weekly, "Printmaking City, a wealth of local talent", Oct 5, 2016
An article following an interview with arts writer Jo Anne Triplett, promoting the Mid America Print Council (MAPC) conference, for which I was a lead organizer. The conference brought 500 artists and educators to Louisville and Southern Indiana from Oct 5-8, 2016.
The Courier-Journal, "Print Matters: Printmakers Converge to Show Art's Evolution", Louisville, KY, Sept 30, 2016
A conversation with arts writer Elizabeth Kramer about the 20+ printmaking exhibitions I helped organize throughout the Louisville Metro area during the Mid America Print Council (MAPC) conference, for which I was a lead organizer. In my interview with Kramer, I discuss the exhibitions, as well as the breadth of technique and concept in contemporary printmaking, as well as economic impact and significance of printmaking conferences to young artists as they choose a place to build their careers.
Sweet Magazine by Hearst Digital Media, "The Ultimate Print Shop", Rebecca Bates, July 2, 2016
An interview about Calliope Arts Printmaking Studio and Gallery, which Rodolfo Salgado Jr and I cofounded in 2015. In the article, Bates describes Calliope as "Louisville's printmaking incubator," with a role in educating both those who have never made prints to seasoned printmakers.
Mighty Tieton, "10x10x10x Tieton Juror Spotlight", Lucas Spivey, Tieton, WA, May 8, 2016
A conversation with the director of an international juried exhibition "10x10x10x Tieton", for which I was a juror. We spoke about what makes Louisville a creative place attractive to artists, the role of printmaking in contemporary art, and suggestions for when emerging artists should apply to national or international exhibitions.
Louisville Eccentric Observer, “A Q&A with artist Susanna Crum on the Opening of Calliope Arts,” Jo Anne Triplett, Louisville, KY, Oct 16, 2015
Grants
I was the Principal Investigator (PI) on all below grants, unless noted otherwise.
Artist Professional Development Grant, Great Meadows Foundation, External
$2,400.00 awarded Dec 10, 2018
Co-PI with collaborator Rodolfo Salgado Jr, artist
Supported travel and a residency at Kunstnarhuset Messen, Ålvik, Norway from April 27 to June 7. While at the KH Messen international residency program, we used the print facilities to create artwork in cyanotype & intaglio, and conducted interviews with factory workers and local community members. We gave a presentation of our work and conducted research at Ålvik Industrial Workers’ Museum. We then traveled to the city of Bergen to view art exhibitions during the Bergen International Festival, Norway’s largest arts festival. We met with directors of galleries and studios, such as Hordaland Art Center, Entrée, and Stiftelsen 3,14. In the city of Stavanger, we connected with Solveig Landa, manager at Grafisk Verksted print studio in the Tou Scene art center, where we conducted three studio visits and toured the gallery and artist workspaces. (Full grant proposal)
Faculty Development Travel Grant, “Society for Utopian Studies Conference: Presentation and Attendance”
$1,000.00 awarded Nov 10, 2018
This Faculty Development Travel Grant supported travel and lodging to present at the Society for Utopian Studies conference to a cross-disciplinary audience at University of California – Berkeley on Nov 3, 2018. A large part of my teaching practice focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to research and image-making, including work with historical archives, libraries, and museum collections. At the Society for Utopian Studies conference, I presented my creative research alongside three other printmaking professors from University of Minnesota, University of Arizona, and California College of the Arts. Each of us models a research-based practice in our artwork and our teaching, and I made connections with scholars in a variety of fields, including American Studies, Cultural Studies, Economics, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Gender Studies, and History. (Full grant proposal)
Grant-in-Aid of Research: "Artist’s Residency at Mildred’s Lane"
$1,000.00 awarded March 7, 2018
The Grant-in-Aid of Research provided crucial support for the payment of fees related to an artist residency at Mildred’s Lane in Beach Lake, PA, which I attended in July 2018. Through this experience, I met many artists, scholars, and curators who work in fields related to my own personal creative research. Based on my collaborative work during the residency with these artists, Rodolfo Salgado Jr and I led a session at Mildred's Lane the following summer (2019) and we completed a collaborative publishing project with artist Caroline Woolard, who we met there. (Full grant proposal)
Commissioned Prints on Canvas for Omni Hotel, Local Language, Oakland, CA, External, National.
$1,150.00 awarded December 31, 2017
My artwork was selected by Local Language, an art, design & fabrication studio that specializes in custom hospitality design. Louisville’s new Omni Hotel hired Local Language to research and select artists, and they selected two of my artworks for display in high-visibility areas of the hotel. I licensed the singular production of two original artworks, "A Place on the Globe" and "Capriccio II: Imagined Communities", to be featured in Louisville's new Omni Hotel, which opened in March 2018. (Image of artwork installed at Omni Hotel) (Contract)
Summer Faculty Fellowship in Research: "The Collaborative 'Workstyle' and the Teacher-Scholar", Indiana University Southeast, Competitive, IU Internal.
$8,000.00 awarded December 6, 2017
Supported studio work and a residency at Mildred's Lane, a 96-acre installation and research space in Beach Lake, PA created by artists Mark Dion and J Morgan Puett. (Full grant proposal)
Grant-in-Aid of Research: "Cyanotype in Many Colors", Indiana University Southeast, Competitive, IU Internal.
$1,000.00 awarded April 24, 2017
Co-PI with Douglas Darnowski, Associate Professor of Biology, IU Southeast
Cyanotype printing of photographs dates back to the 19th century when it was an important method of making prints of plant materials and photographic negatives. Professor Darnowski and Assistant Professor Crum have been mixing alternative solutions to create photographic imagery with additional colors on paper. (Full grant proposal)
Grant-in-Aid of Research: "Artist Residency at Kala Art Institute", IU Southeast, Competitive, IU Internal
$445.00 awarded December 6, 2017
Supported the studio fee for an artist residency an internationally-renowned studio in Berkeley, CA, founded in 1974. While there, I created a series of original stone lithographs and my artwork was acquired for the Kala Art Institute permanent collection and featured in the invitational Kala Artists Annual exhibition, on display at Kala’s gallery Jan - Feb 2018. (Full grant proposal)
Grant for Public Art, the Fund for the Arts, Louisville, KY
$3,000.00 awarded April 2016
Co-PI with Tiffany Carbonneau, Associate Professor of Fine Arts - Digital Art, IU Southeast
Tiffany Carbonneau and I received this grant for the research and production of an architectural video projection on display during the opening night of Churchill Downs, Spring Meet. (Project proposal)
In a 4/13/2016 email, Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Uric Dufrene wrote,
Congratulations to you both! This is a fine example of significant community outreach, and the impact of the arts for the betterment of the community. The Derby exhibit is a classic example of the connection between art and enterprise.Excellent work! Best, Uric
Research Support Fund, IU Southeast, Competitive, IU Internal
$2,835.00 awarded January 5, 2016
Supported travel May 31 – July 4, 2016 to and from Edinburgh, Scotland, where I worked as a visiting artist in the Edinburgh Printmakers studio, creating original lithographs that were part of my solo exhibition, A Collecting Place, at the 1078 Gallery in Chico, California in October – November 2016. See the Summer Faculty Fellowship and Improvement of Teaching Grant descriptions (below) for more details on my activity and productivity. (Full grant proposal)
Summer Faculty Fellowship in Research, "A Collecting Place," IU Southeast, Competitive, IU Internal
$5,000.00 awarded December 8, 2015
Supported travel May 31 – July 4, 2016 to and from Edinburgh, Scotland, where I worked as a visiting artist in the Edinburgh Printmakers studio, creating original lithographs that became part of my solo exhibition, A Collecting Place, at the 1078 Gallery in Chico, California in October – November 2016. In addition to my daily work in the studio, I also conducted research with the collection of the Camera Obscura and World of Illusions, and attended a one-day symposium organized by the Scottish Historic Buildings Trust, which featured speakers from the National Library of Scotland, the City of Edinburgh Council, and the University of Edinburgh. During this symposium, I attended a special viewing of artifacts and archival documents in the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections, which were pertinent to my research of Patrick Geddes and the 19th-century Outlook Tower. (Full grant proposal)
New Frontiers in the Arts and Humanities, “Print Matters, Printing Matters: Mid-America Print Council Biennial Conference,” Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
$19,838.00 awarded April 22, 2016
Co-PI with Samantha Earley and Donna Stallard
Provided funding for speaker honoraria, materials for printmaking demonstrations, promotional materials, and shuttle bus schedule for a conference that brought 500 artists, educators, and students to IU Southeast’s campus Oct 5-8, 2016. (Final grant report)
Mary Alice Hadley Prize for Visual Art, Community Foundation of Louisville, Hadley Pottery, and Louisville Visual Art, Louisville, KY
$5,000.00 awarded June 9, 2013
Supported research and development for the founding of Calliope Arts Printmaking Studio & Gallery, Louisville, KY. In the grant period, I traveled to community-based printmaking studios across the US and met with directors, founders, and studio members. This grant was included in my incoming research records when I joined the faculty at IU Southeast, via Dean Samantha Earley. (Full grant proposal)
Arts-Louisville.com, "Louisville Artist Susanna Crum Wins First Hadley Prize Fellowship," Keith Waits, June 12, 2013.
WFPL, "Susanna Crum Awarded Inaugural M.A. Hadley Visual Art Prize," Erin Keane, June 10, 2013
Applied for and Not Received
Public Art Commission, "It's Possible Here" - Finalist, 2016
Collaborative Public Art Proposal with Tiffany Carbonneau and Gresham Smith and Partners Architecture Firm
$5,000 awarded April 15, 2016. Not selected for $150,000.00 budget.
Our proposal for a $150,000 public art commission made it to the final round of submissions and is currently in review. Our proposed artwork includes architectural lighting with negative spaces that recall the historic warehouses once located at this site, and brick plaques placed in the sidewalk area with imagery that calls attention to important Civil Rights sites located in West Louisville. The lights would change color throughout the night, beginning with warm hues of dawn, and followed by bright blues of day and returning to warm hues of dusk. (Full project proposal)
New Frontiers of Creativity and Scholarship Grant, "Possible Futures," Indiana University, 2016
Principal Investigator: Tiffany Carbonneau, Associate Professor of Fine Arts – Digital Art, Indiana University Southeast
Co-Investigator: Susanna Crum, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts - Printmaking, Indiana University Southeast
Not selected for $60,000.00 funding request
Though we did not receive funding for this, we did create and exhibit an architectural video projection on the exterior of the Ross Art Museum at Ohio Wesleyan University. We used specialized software to allow the image to conform to the architecture (“projection mapping”) of the over 100-year-old historic post office that houses the museum. (Full grant proposal)
Time & Place: Exhibitions of Public Art & History, A Public Art Exhibition Presented by Alexandria Office of the Arts’ Public Art Program, 2016
Co-PI with Tiffany Carbonneau, Associate Professor of Fine Arts - Digital Art, IU Southeast
Not selected for $45,000 budget
Tiffany Carbonneau and I were one of a few selected artists and artist teams invited to submit a proposal for this public art project in Alexandria, Virginia. (Full project proposal)
Awards and Honors
Artist Residency at Kunstnarhuset Messen, Ålvik, Norway
International, competitive
Following an application and portfolio review process, I was invited to attend a residency at Kunstnarhuset Messen in Ålvik, a village in Norway transformed in 1905 with the arrival of Bjølvefossen, an industrial company that used local waterfalls to become one of the world’s largest magnesium-ferrosilicon producers. Housed in the company’s former administrative building, the international residency program’s mission is to provide an environment where regional and international artists live and work together. Collaborator Rodolfo Salgado Jr and I used the print facilities to create works in cyanotype and intaglio exploring relationships between natural and built environments in Ålvik. We gave a presentation and workshop, documented viewpoints of the shore and village, interviewed local factory workers and community leaders, and conducted research at the Ålvik Industrial Workers’ Museum. Concurrent resident artists were from South Africa, Finland, Portugal, and the Netherlands.
Research Fellowship "Exploring Early Modern Maps" at Newberry Library, Chicago, IL
National, competitive
Awarded Oct 29, 2018
A one-day research methods workshop with doctoral candidates and researchers. Led by Jim Akerman of the Center for Renaissance Studies, we examined maps, atlases, and other cartographic material from the Newberry’s collections, with a focus on the production, dissemination, and use of printed maps in the early modern period. This was invaluable for my work with my ongoing, research-based project, Alternative Maps, which utilizes mapping principles, techniques, and norms from the past and present.
Artist Fellowship at Mildred's Lane Complex(ity), Beach Lake, PA
International, competitive
Following an application and portfolio review process, I was awarded an artist fellowship at Mildred’s Lane, a selective cross-disciplinary research program run by interdisciplinary artists Mark Dion and Morgan Puett in collaboration with artists, curators, and scholars from the US and Europe. I attended this program with support of a Summer Faculty Fellowship in Research from July 8 - 30, 2018.
Special Prize in Art Exhibition, Lessedra Art Gallery, Lessedra World Art Print Annual, Sofia, Bulgaria
International, competitive
I was awarded the Special Prize from international jurors Kalli Kalde, Estonia; Anita Klein, England; Luce, Belgium; Jan Wellens, Belgium; Snezhina Bisserova, Bulgaria; and Grethe Hald, Norway. I was the sole prize winner from the US - others were based in England, Denmark, India, Poland, Finland, Austria, Bulgaria, and Japan.
Themed Exhibition Curator, Imaging Utopia, 2018 Southern Graphics Council International conference, Las Vegas, NV
International, competitive
Awarded June 3, 2017
My proposal to curate an exhibition of new works for the 2018 Southern Graphics Council International Conference, Altered Landscapes, was selected by a jury of five SGC International members and former conference chairs. The exhibition features a portfolio of works created by 15 artists working in the US and Qatar, and will be on display at the conference and included in the permanent collection of the Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA.
Artist Residency at Kala Art Institute
International, competitive
Kala Art Institute is a renowned professional art studio and gallery in Berkeley, CA. Since 1974, they have provided resources for artists to make work in lithography, intaglio, screen printing, and more. It was an honor to be selected among an international pool of artists in July 2017 to attend the competitive Artist-in-Residence in December 2017-January 2018. This residency also included the use of Kala's Electronic Media Center, where I used specialized software to complete the designs. Kala Art Institute is an international community of artists who work in the studio and exhibit work on the premises and beyond. My work as Artist-in-Residence resulted in important professional development and invaluable connections with artists and arts professionals in the Bay Area.
Artist Residency at Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh, Scotland
International, competitive
Based on a written proposal and art portfolio submission, I was awarded a month as a visiting artist at Edinburgh Printmakers studio in Edinburgh, Scotland, which hosts artists from across the world as they conduct research and create artwork in the studio. I created work for a solo exhibition, A Collecting Place, at 1078 Gallery, Chico, CA in October 2016. This residency was completed with the help of grants from IU Southeast Improvement of Learning Committee and Research & Grants.
Artist Residency at Kentucky Derby Museum, Louisville, KY
Local, invitational
Awarded Sept 6, 2013
Over six months, I conducted research and created a large-scale mixed media drawing in preparation for an invitational group exhibition, Impressions: The Art of the Race. I was invited to create an artwork in response to the historical archive of the Churchill Downs racetrack, and was given access to all objects in their collection. The result was the project, A Place on the Globe, now in the permanent collection of the Omni Hotel Louisville and featured in the 2016 architectural video projection in collaboration with Tiffany Carbonneau, A Running Loop.
Professional Engagements
Session Leader, "Silver-Iron-Light"
June 15-July 5 2020 (postponed dates TBD due to Covid-19 pandemic), Mildred's Lane, Beach Lake, PA
Collaborators Noah Doely and Rodolfo Salgado Jr
Program Reviewer, Minot State University, Minot, ND
Aug 2020 (forthcoming)
I was selected among faculty at similar institutions to travel to Minot State University and conduct a review of their Art Program. Minot State offers five art degrees, with potential career fields in advertising, illustration, graphic design, marketing, art history, commercial photography, museum and gallery administration, exhibition design, art therapy, professional studio art, independent art instruction, arts organization management and K-12 education. Art students select from these five degrees: BFA in Visual Art, BA in Visual Art, BS in Arts Administration, BS in Multimedia Studies and BSE in Art Education. (BFA and BA degrees offer specialized option areas in Ceramics, Drawing, Graphic Design, Painting, Photography, Printmaking, Traditional Arts, Integrated Media, and Sculpture).
Artist Lecture, "S.T.E.A.M Speaker Series", Kentucky Country Day School, Louisville, KY, Dec 6, 2019
This speaker series features professionals whose careers are based in S.T.E.A.M. disciplines: Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math. All students were enrolled in classes in Kentucky Country Day's Fabrication Lab, so I discussed the role of CNC (computer numeric controlled) technology in my artwork and teaching, and together we talked about ways that digital technology can enhance handmade objects and artworks.
Artist Lecture, "Several Worlds in Several Circles", Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY, Oct 24, 2019
Description: In her lecture, Susanna will discuss the development of her research-based art practice, the roles of digital technology and software in her work with historical print media, and the ways she hopes a transhistorical approach to map-making can inspire new questions and conversations about what comprises a sense of place.
Guest Critic, Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY, Oct 24, 2019
I was invited to serve as a visiting critic for two exhibitions by studio art students at Hobart & William Smith Colleges. I attended a group critique and provided feedback on screenprints.
Guest Critic for MFA Program, Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and Planning, Ithaca, NY, Oct 22, 2019
I was invited to serve as a visiting critic for two exhibitions by studio art MFA students at Cornell University. I met individually with 7 graduate students in the galleries and in their studios.
Artist Lecture, "Live/Work", Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and Planning, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, Oct 22, 2019
Description: AAP Connect “Fearless Creatives” Lecture Series: Becoming an artist is one thing, being a fearless creative is another. Join Susanna Crum (B.F.A. '08) and hear why entrepreneurial drive, resourcefulness, and grit are so important when building any type of creative career.
Session Leader, "Mildred Archaeology"
July 8, 2019 - July 22, 2019, Mildred's Lane, Beach Lake, PA
Rodolfo Salgado Jr and I led a session at an interdisciplinary research space and art residency program. With a group of other artists from across the US, we restored a printing press and made large cyanotypes on fabric and monotype prints, which we displayed during public events. As part of my work at Mildred's Lane, I led a tour and introduced a panel discussion by artists from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, who were in New York with the CEC ArtsLink program.
Artist Lecture, "Transmissions from Calliope Arts"
Mildred's Lane, Beach Lake, PA, United States, July 12, 2019
Description: artists Susanna Crum and Rodolfo Salgado shared updates from their studio in Louisville, KY, and led a discussion about the importance of collaborative workspaces in their practices.
Artist Lecture, "Mapping Alvik"
Kunstnarhuset Messen Open Studio event, Kunstnarhuset Messen, Alvik, Norway, May 24, 2019
Description: artists Susanna Crum and Rodolfo Salgado presented their multimedia installation, "Mapping Alvik," at the international artist residency center to an international audience of resident artists and visitors from around the Hardanger region of Norway.
Artist Lecture, "Featured Artist"
Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock, PA, Mar 27, 2019
Description: I gave art students a virtual tour of my studio via Skype, and discussed my creative research and recent projects, as well as my studio Calliope Arts and teaching practice. The conversation resulted in a fall 2019 collaboration with the Interuniversity Sketchbook Project, an exchange of 14 sketchbooks between students at university art programs across the US.
Artist Lecture, "Found Fictions"
Minot State University, Minot, ND, Feb 27, 2019
Description: artists Susanna Crum and Rodolfo Salgado shared updates from their studio in Louisville, KY, a discussion of their individual artistic practices and their two-person exhibition at the on-campus Flat Tail Press Gallery at Minot State University.
Panelist, Making Our Place: Disruptive Narratives in Contemporary Printmaking, Society for Utopian Studies conference
University of California - Berkeley and St. Mary’s College of California, Berkeley, CA, Nov 6, 2018
"Speculative Futures and Queer Ecologies" - Corinne Teed, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
"Alternative Maps, Aspirational Pasts" - Susanna Crum, Indiana University Southeast, New Albany, IN
"Out of the Sky, Into the Dirt" - Aaron Coleman, Arizona State University, Tucson, AZ
"Queer Illuminations: Utopias in Print and Performance" - Jaime Knight, California College of the Arts, Oakland, CA
Panel Abstract: Each printmaker in this panel will approach the question of creative dissent through the production of the utopic imaginary via printmaking and collaborative studio practices. In the 502 years since Thomas More published “Utopia”, printmaking has enacted social change, broadened worldviews, and made stories of those on the margins visible to the largest possible audience. Throughout the 20th century, as print processes became more ubiquitous and accessible, they allowed marginalized communities new strategies for cultural production and for engaging with public discourse. Prints become interventions on public space, on the hegemony of dominant narratives, and on elitist jurisdictions of knowledge production.
In Making Our Place: Disruptive Narratives in Contemporary Printmaking, panelists discuss strategies of printmaking for reimagining, revising, or resisting our present social landscapes. These artists use the authority of print’s visual languages and distribution techniques to expose stories and perspectives that challenge the status quo. Utopic trends in printmaking include the mapping of future social relations, practices of collectivity and collaboration and traditions of appropriation and reimagining the archive. In contrast to popular notions of the solitary artist, printmakers often thrive in collaborative studio environments and facilitate community-based practices within and beyond traditional exhibition contexts. Panelists will discuss the ways their work engages collective utterances throughout their creative process. In place of utopia’s Greek etymology meaning “no place,” they will discuss print-based strategies that create places and opportunities for concrete utopias that urge viewers to imagine beyond.
Artist lecture, "Collaborative "Workstyles" at Mildred's Lane"
SARC Series, Indiana University Southeast, New Albany, IN, Oct 31, 2018
A lecture on the experiences, presentations, collaborations, connections, and work generated during an artist residency funded by a 2018 Summer Faculty Fellowship.
Roundtable discussion, "Yes, You Can! The Ups, Downs, Ins, and Outs of Hosting a Conference"
Mid America Print Council conference, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, Oct 6, 2018
A panel with three past Mid America Print Council (MAPC) conference coordinators with the goal of sharing our experiences with collaboration, cooperation, and community while planning a four-day event at our institutions and hometowns. I had served as a lead conference organizer for the MAPC conference in 2016, which was hosted at IU Southeast with one day at University of Louisville. Each panelist presented a brief introduction of the types of collaboration they engaged in, the cooperation from colleagues and the university in general they asked for and received, as well as the level of interest and involvement of their local community while planning for their conference.
Artist lecture, "Structure and Experience"
Mildred's Lane, Beach Lake, PA, July 9, 2018
A lecture on my creative research, including work with historical collections, museums, archives, and oral histories.
Guest Critic, Governor's School for the Arts, Centre College, Danville, KY, July 6, 2018
I was invited to serve as a visiting critic for the final review day of the 2018 Governor's School for the Arts - Visual Arts program. I attended student presentations of work, and led formal group discussions in response to their group art exhibition.
Artist lecture, "Alternative Maps"
Kent Blossom Workshop Series, Kent State University, Kent State University College of Art, Kent, OH, May 31, 2018
Lecture Description: As a printmaker and interdisciplinary artist, Susanna Crum conducts research-based projects that investigate maps, printed ephemera, and viewing devices as social artifacts at the intersection of past, present, and future. With processes like cyanotype, lithography, woodcut, and screenprint, Susanna combines digital and analog technologies, and emphasizes print media’s roles in maintaining relationships - and erasures - between people and place. Whether she is working with printmaking processes or architectural video projection, Susanna's multilayered images merge 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.
Exhibition juror, 10x10x20 Exhibition
California State University - Chico, Chico, CA, April 9 - 11, 2018
I was invited to serve as a juror for a student art exhibition. I met with students, reviewed artwork, and selected awards for the exhibition.
Artist lecture, "A Call to Print"
University of Kentucky School of Visual Studies, Lexington, KY, April 13, 2018
Rodolfo Salgado Jr and I gave a lecture on our personal creative research and artwork, as well as our experiences establishing Louisville's only shared fine art printmaking workspace, Calliope Arts. Together we discussed our work as artists and entrepreneurs in our community, and answered questions from students about how to start their own businesses and continue sustainable studio practices after graduation with their BFAs and MFAs in studio art.
Guest Critic, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, April 13, 2018
Conducted 8 studio visits each with MFA and BFA candidates, viewing their artwork, providing professional advice, and responding to their research.
Artist lecture, "Worldmakers"
Middle Tennessee State University School of Art and Design, Murfreesboro, TN, Oct 24, 2017
I discussed the development and influences for my research-based artistic practice, as well as recent artist residencies and creative entrepreneurship, including my experiences establishing and managing Calliope Arts Printmaking Studio in Louisville. The MTSU printmaking area head, Nick Satinover, wrote the following of my lecture and visit:
"Your visit has created tangible proof that [a visiting artist program] is a thing the department should devote our resources to continue. Most importantly to me, it showed my advanced students an intellectual and research based approach to art/printmaking."
Artist lecture, "Imaginary Lines", University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, Oct 11, 2017
Artist lecture, "Constellations"
Catapult Creative House, Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau, MO, April 6, 2017
Panel chair, "Crossroads: Intersections and Interventions"
Southern Graphics Council International conference, March 16, 2017, Atlanta, GA
My proposed panel was selected with an international group of panelists:
Carolyn McKenzie-Craig, Lecturer in Printmaking, National Art School, Sydney, Australia
Aaron Coleman, Assistant Professor, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
Nicholas Satinover, Assistant Professor, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN
Guest Lecture, "People Powered Prints"
California State University - Chico, Chico, CA, Oct 2016
Along with fellow artist Rodolfo Salgado Jr, I gave an hour-long presentation, “People Powered Prints,” on my creative research, teaching activities at IU Southeast, as well as the founding of Calliope Arts Printmaking Studio & Gallery in Louisville, which has provided a space for artists to make and exhibit prints since 2015. Rodolfo and I gave advice and answered questions about starting your own printmaking studio, applying to graduate programs, and career opportunities in printmaking. After our visit, Professor Eileen Macdonald wrote,
"Your lecture with Rudy Salgado truly inspired our students and was commended by faculty that attended; you are such an articulate speaker. By sharing your creative process... you showed our students how ideas and creative work develop over time... Your lecture instilled the importance of research, which is so important for all students to understand."
Artist lecture, “A Collecting Place”
1078 Gallery, Chico, CA, Oct 2016
During the public reception for my solo exhibition A Collecting Place, I gave a brief lecture in my artwork and research, supported by a 2016 IU Southeast Summer Faculty Fellowship in Research. Following my visit, exhibition curator Thomasin Saxe wrote,
“From the beginning of our planning your show last year through the installation and the reception this year, you have been the most conscientious, professional, helpful, intelligent, generous, and talented artist… exhibiting a brilliant, interesting, complex show that looks beautiful in our space; and giving such a polished, enthusiastic detailed long talk at the reception, which kept everyone riveted (rather than restless).... I believe the art world - especially as it connects with the broader social world - will benefit from your inspiring plans for many years to come.”
Guest Curator, "Interventions: Re-Framing the Printed Image"
21c Museum, Louisville, KY
April 2016 - Oct 2016
Artist lecture, "People Powered Prints"
Kentucky College of Art & Design at Spalding University, Louisville, KY, Sept 2016
Artist Lecture, "Lost in (Public) Space"
Community Arts Center, Danville, KY
May 2016
Presentation followed by discussion of my community-based approach to historical research and art-making. The audience for this lecture was primarily members of Danville's Community Arts Center, who had previously been engaged with the "Art Under Pressure" steamroller printmaking event, funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America grant, for which I was a guest artist, instructor, and consultant.
Career Mentor, “FLUX”, Southern Graphics Council International conference, Portland, OR.
April 1, 2016
Based on my application, I was invited to serve as Career Mentor during 5 one-on-one sessions during the international printmaking conference.
Panelist, “Constructing Programs and Communities"
Southern Graphics Council International conference
March 18-21, 2015, Knoxville, TN
I was invited to serve on a panel with an international group of panelists:
Emmy Lingscheit (chair), University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
Mark Bovey, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University, Nova Scotia, Canada
Zach Stensen, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Doha, Qatar
Contribution to Collaborative Projects
Publisher, collaborative editions of 19 original artworks "C19: Art Works for Kentucky"
April 2, 2020 - present
19 visual, literary and performing artists with Kentucky ties are working with Calliope Arts to publish open editions of prints. Hand-pulled lithographs, relief prints, screenprints, and etchings will be available for purchase on Calliope’s website. At least 33% of proceeds will be donated to Artist Relief Trust, a state-wide coalition initiative led by ELEVATOR Artist Resource to provide emergency assistance to artists in Kentucky and Southern Indiana.
Session Leader, "Silver-Iron-Light"
June 15-July 5 2020 (postponed dates TBD due to Covid-19 pandemic), Mildred's Lane, Beach Lake, PA
Collaborators Noah Doely and Rodolfo Salgado Jr
Description: Set in the landscape with an extravaganza of 19th and 20th-century equipment, we will facilitate a series of plein-air tintype, cyanotype, and anthotype processes using a variety of materials including hand-coated plates, paper, fabric, and plant-based pigments. You may bring your own equipment or learn to use ours. These alchemical processes combine science and wonder; collaboration and experimentation will be part of events and activities throughout the session. We will begin with the design and setup of a photography studio for processing and developing in the field. Participants will work in the landscape, composing site-sensitive ‘portraits’ of Mildred’s Lane. This session will culminate in a collective, curated image archive exhibition at The Mildred Complex(ity) Project Space.
Publisher, collaborative edition of original artwork "Outside In", with artist Micah Bloom
Aug 3 - 8, 2019, Calliope Arts, Louisville, KY
Professor Micah Bloom of Minot State University received professional development and research funding from Minot State University to travel to my Louisville studio, Calliope Arts, and produce an edition of original artworks in stone lithography. Fellow artist Rodolfo Salgado and I organized the project and materials, and provided technical feedback and advice throughout the artmaking process. Together we printed an edition of stone lithographs, some of which will become part of Minot State University's permanent print collection and will be shown in future exhibitions.
Session Leader, "Mildred Archaeology"
July 8, 2019 - July 22, 2019, Mildred's Lane, Beach Lake, PA
Rodolfo Salgado Jr and I led a session at an interdisciplinary research space and art residency program. With a group of other artists from across the US, we restored a printing press and made large cyanotypes on fabric and monotype prints, which we displayed during public events. As part of my work at Mildred's Lane, I led a tour and introduced a panel discussion by artists from Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, who were in New York with the CEC ArtsLink program.
Publisher, collaborative edition of original artworks "Woodcuts for Caroline Woolard's Moore College of Art Exhibition" with artist Caroline Woolard
Jan 15 - April 27, 2019, Calliope Arts, Louisville, KY
Caroline Woolard is the first recipient of the Jane and David Walentas Endowed Fellowship at Moore College of Art. As part of this Fellowship, Woolard partnered with Calliope Arts to produce a suite of 9 laser-cut woodblock printed editions, which were exhibited alongside her sculptures in an exhibition at Moore in fall 2019. Because Woolard is not a printmaker, Calliope Arts offered creative collaboration and expertise in making solutions to her creative problems and questions, and allowed Woolard to include printed multiples in her exhibition.
Collaborating artist, A Place in Time, collaboration with Tiffany Carbonneau
Aug 2016, architectural video projection during IN Light IN Festival in Indianapolis, IN
Supported by The Indianapolis Community Foundation
In August 2016, Bethel A.M.E., Indianapolis’ oldest African American church and vital social support structure from the Civil War onward, packed up more than a century of history and move to a new location, making way for a commercial enterprise that would replace, rather than repair, much of its historic architecture. For this collaborative work, we conducted research in Indianapolis and worked closely with church historian Olivia McGee-Lockhart to create a video that celebrates the people of Bethel A.M.E. and their impact on the city's social landscape. A Place in Time illuminated the outer walls of the church with a site-specific projection that combined archival, found, and interview-based imagery to explore the complexity of influences that led to the current state of the building and congregation, highlighted the historic architecture that would soon be lost, and celebrated the significant roles of the 147 year-old church within local and national history.
IndyStar, "IN Light IN free festival lights up the canal," Aug. 27, 2016
Indianapolis Recorder, "Interactive Light Festival to brighten Indianapolis Downtown Canal," Aug 3, 2016
Collaborating artist, A Running Loop, collaboration with Tiffany Carbonneau 2016
April 2016, Churchill Downs
Supported by The Louisville Fund for the Arts; equipment supported by Indiana University Southeast
This architectural video projection was exhibited at the racetrack's Opening Night and consisted of a seven-minute video loop that illuminated the facade of the original Grandstand and Jockey Club at the track. The video portrayed the names and faces of the twelve African American jockeys who won sixteen Kentucky Derbies, between 1875 and 1902, along with historical footage highlighting divisions between labor and spectatorship, which presaged the exclusion and subsequent decline of African American jockeys after 1902.
IUS Now, “IU Southeast fine arts faculty create video projection for opening night at Churchill Downs,” Steven Krolak, April 29, 2016
Collaborating artist, Inside and Outside, collaboration with Tiffany Carbonneau
April 2016, 1619 Center for Art and Activism. Supported by B. Kind Festival and 1619 Center for Art and Activism; equipment supported by Indiana University Southeast.
This site-specific architectural video projection was located in the Russell neighborhood in West Louisville, a historically underserved area of the city, and featured maps, urban planning and real estate documents, and newspaper headlines related to exclusionary “redlining” practices of the Home Owner’s Lending Corporation in the 20th century.
The Courier-Journal, “Art of all stripes featured in B.KIND events”, Elizabeth Kramer
Collaborating artist, It’s Possible Here. Collaborative Public Art Proposal with Tiffany Carbonneau and Gresham Smith and Partners Architecture Firm, 2016, Louisville, KY
Our proposal for a $150,000 public art commission that engages the 9th Street underpass at Main Street in downtown Louisville was short-listed for the commission. (Full project proposal)
Community and Leadership
President, Mid America Print Council
National, elected
2018 to present
Since my election in October 2018, I have led the board of this member-driven nonprofit organization in the planning of a biennial conference, the publication of the MAPC Journal, and the organization of juried exhibitions, grants, professional development opportunities, and other programming to support our membership.
The Mid America Print Council is an educational and community-based organization that focuses on all print related arts. Embracing both time-honored and innovative approaches, we promote awareness and appreciation of traditional and contemporary forms of printmaking. We are an inclusive association for individuals and institutions, administering the sharing of technical and critical information regarding print. Honoring our predecessors, we aim to bring new and sustained interest to this unique medium. Active on multiple platforms, MAPC is an organization that provides members with access to a network of printmakers, resources, opportunities, newsletters, and a biennial conference that features speakers, workshops, panels, shows, and exchanges. Through calls for participation, we organize members’ exhibitions and publish The Mid America Print Council Journal. Our goal is to recognize, advocate, and continue research in historical, current, and future print technologies.
Co-founder and Associate Director, Calliope Arts Printmaking Studio & Gallery, Louisville, KY
2013-present
Dedicated to increasing knowledge and practice of contemporary print media on a national scale, Calliope Arts provides access to equipment, classes, and exhibitions for intaglio, relief, lithography, and screen printing. Along with cofounder Rodolfo Salgado Jr, we have completed several collaborative publishing projects, hold an annual community-based print sale, and display work by over 35 artists working in the US and Canada.
Lead Conference Organizer, Mid America Print Council Conference
Oct 5-8, 2016, New Albany, IN and Louisville, KY
Supported by a New Frontiers Grant, Indiana University
This conference brought 500 students, artists, and educators from across the US to Indiana University Southeast and University of Louisville.
Guest Artist and Professional Advisor, Community Arts Center, Danville, KY
National, invited
Jan 5, 2016 - May 31, 2016
Sponsored by National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America grant
I provided consulting for the original grant proposal and implementation of workshops, and later wrote rubrics and lesson plans to accompany a National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America grant, submitted by the Community Arts Center of Danville. After the grant was awarded, I planned and executed a series of six on-site workshops, as well as a public steamroller printmaking event in Danville.