We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Susan Hensel. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Susan below.
Alright, Susan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you take us back in time to the first dollar you earned as a creative – how did it happen? What’s the story?
Sometime, between the ages of 14 and 16, I hung my drawings at a city-square clothesline art fair in Ithaca, NY. Yes! An actual clothesline! It was the norm more than 50 years ago!
As a teenager I ordered books from Dover and a cool, now forgotten, wholesaler of used books who sent a newspaper tabloid catalog monthly. I had ordered the Dover guide to anatomy for artists and a photobook of nude poses for artists. The photobook was alarming for a variety of reasons. It was all women with improbable bosoms and airbrushed crotches! They looked like rubber dolls! I showed the book to my mother and she said not to worry about it and draw to my heart’s content. So I did! I did scores of drawings in pencil on lovely, rough manila paper. These were the drawings I hung on the clothesline for, maybe, $10 each.
Now Ithaca is the home to Cornell University and Ithaca College and many fraternities. I sold a drawing of an especially large breasted woman to a Cornell student. Imagine that! Somehow, I do not think it made it home from his dorm wall at the end of the semester!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am a sculptor who works with textiles and mixed media. I create small and large scale works combining digital embroidery methods and my knowledge of color to create sparkling, changeable color experiences for viewers.
Digital embroidery was created for the fashion industry, commonly seen on ball caps, varsity jackets and uniforms. I recognized the unusual nature of how color works with the bespoke thread and began developing original designs that are designed to fold and scrunch into permanent three dimensional forms. I combine these forms with woodworking, hardware and found objects.
My goal is to create a moment of pause for people in their increasingly frenetic lives! We could all use a break, right? A week would be nice, but sometimes all we have is a moment. I provide that moment to pause, reflect and return to the task at hand refreshed. THAT, my friends, is the radical nature of beauty.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
I am called to use my time, talent and passion in service of personal and community transformation through storytelling and art. Actually, I think we all are! Whatever your particular skills are, how can they be used to build a better world?
I am not a marcher. I am not an extrovert. I am not constituted to be a be a lawmaker. Frankly, crowds scare me!
But what I CAN do is create artwork of overwhelming beauty that has the potential to stop a person in their tracks, take a deep breath. pause and return to their lives in a more peaceful state. And, I am very skilled at getting it seen!
Since time before history was a concept, people have been creating both useful and beautiful things. Imagine it. Back in prehistory, someone had a great fire-stirring-stick. They decided to mark it somehow to identify it as: “Mine” or “Not firewood” or “Magic” or “Cool!” Was that marking necessary to the fire- stirring-stick’s function? Perhaps not, but it provided a different experience, a unique experience, maybe even a transcendent experience.
Art making is hardwired in the human animal It provides for needs beyond shelter and food.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
I have found social media to be essential for outreach and recognition. Before social media, I was a slide sender, a postcard purveyor, faxer. I got the word out through catalogs, brochures, faxes, press releases, posters, guerilla marketing and snail mail. Most of that has gone by the wayside. I still send press releases, but they go by email now.
Social media is now necessary. It’s all about being seen. No one is going to discover you unless you make your work visible somehow.
I was an early adopter of social media and email marketing when I opened the Susan Hensel Gallery in Minneapolis 20 years ago. I developed extensive email lists both organically and through mining and research. I learned the best days and times of the week to send. It was a system of 2 emails: a longish one announcing the show and why you would want to come, followed by a brief reminder with an invitation to share with friends. Both were short, “above the fold” in length, acknowledging that people are at work and don’t have a lot of time to waste. Faxing had worked well in the smaller market I had moved from, but was ineffective here, so I dropped it. Soon I picked up Facebook and Twitter and began posting there. THAT brought in lots of people! Twitter brought in reporters!
It was laborious! But now there are scheduling platforms of various sorts that make it much easier. I now post both organically and on a scheduler. The organic posts are simply shots from my days in the studio…how things are made, what the process looks like and my dogs! The scheduled posts are associated with both my own exhibitions and the exhibits that I curate. In a few hours I can develop and schedule at least a month of posts that go on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, including tags!
I also blog lots of art business info and make sure it posts to social media and when I send newsletters, I make sure they post to the platforms I use. I pay attention to SEO optimization…but I am not an expert by any means! My WordPress websites encourage me to do it and it helps name recognition as well.
How do I know it works? I do a self-search on google. It used to be that I barely registered in the search engines. Now I dominate the first few pages! And, I get invited to exhibit, without asking or applying, although I continue to do both. (Fun fact: there are two more Susan Hensels: one is an oil painter and one is a gaming commissioner! Go find us!)
Contact Info:
- Website: www.susanhenselprojects.com www.susanhenselgallery.com
- Instagram: susan_hensel_multimedia_artist
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/susan.hensel1 and https://www.facebook.com/SusanHenselProjects/
- Twitter: HenselGallery
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvBH9linD5XCcCSh8Lw46RQ
- Other: artsy.net/susan-hensel-gallery https://www.artsy.net/artist/susan-hensel?metric=in