Son[i]a #308 Susan Bee

Susan Bee defends the political and subversive potential that develops when art and pleasure unite. Which is why imagination, poetry, humour, subjectivity, textures, colours, lines, and matter play an essential role in her work, both in her collages and paintings and her artist’s books.

Susan Bee was born in New York, where she has always lived and worked. As an art student in the late sixties, she first came in contact with feminist activism and other social movements such as black power, gay rights, and protests against the Vietnam War.

In 1986, she embarked on the project M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a self-managed art magazine that she co-edited with fellow artist Mira Schor for thirty years. From the strict black and white pages of M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a plurality of voices of artists, poets, thinkers, and writers have discussed and reflected on art and feminism, art and racism, art and maternity, and art and activism, and on censorship, sexuality, poetry, aesthetics, and visual culture.

In this podcast, Susan Bee talks about the particularities of being a woman and an artist who has passed the age threshold of 65 in New York’s artistic ecosystem today. She also reflects on the possible virtues of tokenism in relation to the historical and still crucial demands of feminism. Bee also talks about her painting and work processes, and about the importance of creating and working as part of a community, as well as looking back to the early years of M/E/A/N/I/N/G and her participation in A.I.R. Gallery, the first co-operative women’s gallery in the United States.