Susanna received her MFA and MA in Printmaking with minors in Sculpture and Intermedia from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and her BFA from the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at 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, 1078 Gallery in Chico, Manifest Creative Research Gallery and Drawing Center in Cincinnati, the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft in Louisville, and the Liu Haisu Art Museum in Shanghai, China.

Susanna returned to her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky to start the city’s first shared printmaking workspace, Calliope Arts Printmaking Studio & Gallery, with fellow artist and partner Rodolfo Salgado Jr. Since 2015, she has taught printmaking as an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Southeast, New Albany, IN, and as the Associate Director of Calliope Arts.

ARTIST´S STATEMENT

Susanna Crum conducts research-led projects that investigate maps and printed ephemera as social artifacts at the intersection of past, present, and future.With cyanotype, lithography, video, and sculpture, Susanna merges digital and analog technologies and emphasizes print media’s roles in maintaining relationships – and erasures – between people and place. Her multilayered images combine 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.

“ ‘The process of drawing’ says Crum, ‘allows for detailed study of maps over time.’ The landscape we know, or think we know, has been drawn and redrawn over time, not least of all by us, the viewer. Each of us carries in our minds a series of maps: how to get our child to school the quickest, where a particular shoe repair shop is, a quiet place to take an evening walk. But such maps are generalizations; all maps, in truth, are generalizations, a vague sketch. One need only look at a Rand McNally to see where deserts lie, or farmland, or even burgeoning housing developments in the suburbs as enormous white spaces. As far as the map is concerned, there is simply nothing there to make a legend of.

But what Crum surely intends us to think is that the space in the maps is filled by our imaginations, the source of all legends. To map our city is a way to pinpoint a place where something significant happened. Such maps occur in the past: Here was my first kiss, here where my father was buried, here where I first saw a bald eagle. These are the survey markers of our lives.

A map, though, is also about the future: Here is where I need to be for my vacation next summer, the meeting tomorrow, the job interview next week. Or, as is often the case with us, here is the prettiest route, a drive through overhanging trees, with an occasional view of the sky.

‘A city is many worlds in the same place’ writes Rebecca Solnit, and this is precisely because there are so many of us making maps. The world itself, coupled with our imagination, is the only map we will know. Were we to combine every map of the mind, as Crum suggests with the ever-changing video or the cyanotype resembling geology as much as cartography, we might, as William Blake suggests, see the world as it truly is: infinite.”

Extract from The Map is Never the Country: Susanna Crum’s ‘Watershed Globe Project’ by Sean Patrick Hill | 2020