Suzanne Gold is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar. She received an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, where she developed significant practice in Fiber & Material Studies. Interested in mapping the way we visualize thought process and self reflection through personal imagery, Suzanne generates visual mindscapes that represent a journey inward. During her time at SAIC, she developed a method of creating images using an open-screen printing technique similar to a textile production process. Putting the fabric through several dye baths, painting dye directly onto the fabric, and then printing on top through hand-drawn and cut stencils to achieve images that hover on the edge of abstraction. Her work spans medium and material—always searching for the right form to catch the idea--using different printmaking techniques or digital drawing tools to create images. Her work and research with the international art collective HAIR CLUB has been featured in the MoMA Salon Series, at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, and the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. HAIR CLUB’s unique research methodology was featured as a case study in a new volume entitled Socially Engaged Art History and Beyond: Alternative Approaches to the Theory and Practice of Art History (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021).

By imaging the subjective internal spaces of her mind into a physical estate--with a moat, a meadow, high walls, a fortress--the images in Suzanne's work become metaphor: for blocked memories, and dead ends, for feelings of isolation and walled grief.  The journey of self discovery begins in the protoplasm of the swimming pool. The pool is a real place situated in her deepest memory: a space of safety and comfort from the shifts of family tectonics in early life, but also more recently a mind prison, a place she returns to in periods of emotional heaviness. Being underwater, being separated from others, with wavy figures hovering just beyond the surface are unreadable as friend or foe. Bursting out of the surface of the water and up onto a vast meadow, a walled garden is visible in the distance. A lexicon of imagery emerges as new levels of self knowledge and new memories are unlocked. Imagined as a memory palace, doors open on long corridors. Eventually, it becomes easier to map the pathway of a thought as it travels the distance between experience and meaning.

A book of poems and illustrations detailing this journey--ALLTALK--is forthcoming from Meekling Press in 2022.

HAIR CLUB is an ongoing interdisciplinary, research-based scholarly collaboration between artists Kelly Lloyd, Suzanne Gold, and Michal Lynn Shumate. Over the past seven years, HAIR CLUB has consolidated individual research vectors via collaborative, public-facing events into archives of hair stories, and distilled this research into a teaching curriculum that we have shared internationally. Most recently, HAIR CLUB shared research at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, IL (2020) and MoMA's Salon Series on Hair (2019). HAIR CLUB's methodology was also featured in the volume Socially Engaged Art History and Beyond: Alternative Approaches to the Theory and Practice of Art History (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). Research on hair takes on an expansive, associative methodology, one that is rooted in multi-disciplinarity. A discussion of hair might lead us marching alongside the spiky leg hairs of the second-wave Feminists, or guide us candlelit, along the darkened hallways of mourning jewelry, woven from a dearly departed loved one’s locks in the Victorian era. A discussion of hair might bring us to culturally-determined beauty standards, the global hair market, and the history of shaving and the origins of hairlessness. Hair as a material is implicated in science, genetics, history, art history, material culture, popular culture, newsmedia and advertising. It touches upon expressions of gender, sexuality, identity, religion, fetishism, beauty, and politics. By honoring the mark of the anecdotal, the oral storytelling or social media sharing around hair, we welcome in newly embodied forms of archiving into scholarly discourse. By acknowledging that the personal is political, we advance intersectional feminist and anti-racist platforms. Share your hair story here: https://www.hairhairhair.club/hair-stories.

Using an encounter with a work of art as a catalyst for the creation of meaning, ALLTALK is a magic schoolbus journey through the back roads of the mind, where memory, past experience, values, and other associative offerings lurk to add resonance to the act of interpretation. Forthcoming from Meekling Press in 2022. This will be Suzanne Gold's first book of poetry.