Suzanne McClelland
Suzanne McClelland
Lab Grant Resident
“Dieu Donné gave McClelland a new medium—handmade paper—through which to explore these ideas. Over the course of the residency, she produced several series of collages in which figures or numbers appear to float on dense black or white grounds. One of these series, called Articulate Muscle, which McClelland turned into an animation, is based on the event at the Whitney and features cutouts of Schwarzenegger, Zane, and Corney. One might assume that these works were made by carefully placing the cutouts directly onto the pulp. But, in fact, she held pieces of Xerox copies and silk-screened text about yea high over the freshly pulled sheets of paper pulp, letting them fall where they may and stay there. Making paper is a messy, hands-on activity, and McClelland took advantage of the medium’s lack of control, allowing for and even encouraging ‘happy accidents’.”
— Claire Barliant, excerpt from Made to Measure, essay for Suzanne McClelland: Articulate Muscle 1976, Lab Grant Publication Series No. 17, Dieu Donné.
About the Artist
Suzanne McClelland (b. 1959, Jacksonville, FL) has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad since the early 1990s. Her practice includes large-scale paintings, works on paper and books, often extracting fragments of speech or text from various political or cultural sources and exploring the social, symbolic and material possibilities that reside within language.
McClelland has participated in the 1993 and 2014 Whitney Biennials and has been the subject of solo presentations at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Amy Smith-Stewart; The University of Virginia Museum of Art, curated by Jennifer Farrell; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, Philip Morris branch, curated by Thelma Golden. Her paintings are held in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Yale University Art Gallery, The Albright-Knox Gallery, and The Walker Art Center. Awards and residencies include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, PS1/ Clocktower, Nancy Graves Foundation Grant, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Berg Contemporary invitational Residency in Stykkisholmur, Iceland, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, Lab Grant Residency with Dieu Donne Papermill and a Visiting Artist with Urban Glass and Troedsson Villa, Nikko Japan. Mcclelland has held visiting faculty positions in the Fine Arts Department at SVA, Department of Visual Arts at Columbia University, Yale University Department of Painting and Printmaking and Maryland Institute of Art and has been on the Board of Governors at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture since 1999. Recent publications include monograph “Suzanne McClelland: 36-24-36” with an essay contribution by Thierry de Duve, published by team (gallery, inc.) in 2016 and distributed by D.A.P., as well as “Playlist”, “Knock Knock” and "Net Worth," all published by Space Sisters Press with a text contribution for the latter by Amy Smith-Stewart. (Source: Artist’s website)
For more information, please visit their website:http://www.suzannemcclelland.net