We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Susan Mastrangelo. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Susan below.

Hi Susan , thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I have had several projects throughout my years which stand out as significant, but two stand out as profoundly meaningful.
During my years teaching full time, I worked in wood, plaster, resin and rubber. Over a period of several decades I found my work becoming more figurative, and in 1997 I began to focus on sculpted faces, heads, figures, installations, and finally flat dangling figures. In 2013 I created an installtion of figures on the walls of St. Peters Church, Citicorp building in midtown New York City reflecting the personalities and activities taking place outside. There was a man from a shelter who came in every day to pick up his mail and he was in the process of getting a job. He told me my entire installation gave him the hope he needed to keep pursuing his dream.
The second show was at Sloan Kettering in Brooklyn, titled Pulse. Patients coming out of Chemotherapy would interact with the brightly colored figures which hung from the ceiling and walls, alleviating if for only a short time the pain and fear they were dealing with. The installation took up four hundred square feet in the lobby of Sloan Kettering.

Susan , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My mother was an artist and my father was a journalist. As a child I lived in Queens New York, and when I was a teenager, we moved to Washington, D.C. where I attended Woodrow Wilson High School, and majored in art. I was already familiar with the museums in D.C. but I became a regular and fell in love with all they had to offer. As a teenager I new every painting in every room of the National Gallery, and the Phillips Gallery. I studied the periods of art, the styles, and the specific artists by sitting in each room every Saturday. The Phillips Gallery became my home away from home. Even now I can remember the room of Degas, the room of Rothko, Klee, Renior etc. I had a choice of art schools to go to, but because of my focus on figuration and the formal aspects of visual art, I chose Kansas City Art Institute. Later I attended the New York Studio School and then received my MFA under the tutelage of Philip Guston at Boston University. 

Of all the places I lived, I love New York the most and have lived here since graduate school amidst the city’s artistic possibilities. I have shown my work here and nationally and internationally, and have received a Mercedes Matter Award (named after the Studio School’s founder), a Rockwell Visiting Artist Grant, and two grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation. I’ve been a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, a guest at Civitella Ranieri, and a resident at Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, the Tyrone Guthrie Center, and The Triangle Workshop where Anthony Caro introduced me to steel and encouraged me to weld.
For 27 years I taught art and chaired the art department at The Buckley School, a private middle school in New York City. Since 2017 I’ve worked full time as an artist, and I currently have a studio at The Old American Can Factory in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn.

I am greatful for the pivotal experiences that have helped shape and guide me as an artist. At Boston University Philip Guston gave me direction and encouragement. During my five years in Boston, I worked primarily in oil painting and also began to work with clay, creating narrative scenes with figures, which I used as maquettes for the paintings. When I then moved to New York, I was focusing primarily on painting and sculpture. I also studied acting for four years, which I found exhilarating. This experience in theater fueled my passion for independent form. My pieces became totemic – huge installations. I began to work three-dimensionally; I saw my pieces as allusions to a figure defined both by its independence and its inherent connection to a group. During this time I was supported by two grants from the Pollack Krasner Foundation. My experience at Yaddo also stands out as an opportunity that ignited vital artistic growth. I continued to work with maquettes, in cardboard, and saw how to bring the process to wood. I brought in a variety of materials – bits of lead and steel from scrapyards in Saratoga – and learned to integrate them in a way that was stable. The residency gave me confidence and friends in the art community who I remain close to today. 
My position as Art Department Chair at The Buckley School in NYC was a continuous learning experience and constant challenge, as I had previously taught as an adjunct in colleges in and around Boston. In teaching adolescent boys of the New York elite, I sought through such mediums as paint, sculpture, and printmaking to offer my students new ways of looking at life, and to think differently of themselves beyond their backgrounds. 

Throughout my years teaching full time, I continued to work in wood, plaster, resin and rubber. Over a period of several decades I found my work becoming more figurative, while focusing on sculpted faces and heads, figures, installations, and finally flat dangling figures, which I still do as installations for shows when asked (for example, a show in Woodstock celebrating a women’s right to vote and another at Sloan Kettering in Brooklyn titled Pulse). One of my favorite pieces was a collaboration with my friend Geoffrey O’Brien, the poet and essayist. Together we created a book of photos of thirty of my sculpted heads accompanied by his poems. Geoffrey wrote haiku-style odes to the expressions on the small faces I molded from clay, and critic Barry Schwabsky wrote an afterword. The book, entitled Heads in Limbo, was published by Conveyor Arts. 
Like most NYC artists, finding work space has been a constant frustration. I was forced to move my studio seven times in three decades, around Chelsea and Dumbo. Six years ago I found a refuge at The Old American Can Factory located in the Gowanus Brooklyn. Although still expensive, it is a true artistic home and has allowed me to focus on my work in a building owned by people who love art, and where I am surrounded by other focused working artists.
In the past couple of years I have had a generous review in Art Forum by critic Barry Schwabsky on my one-person show
at the 490 Atlantic Gallery in Brooklyn. A review in Art Spiel (an online magazinge), a catalogue with an essay by writer Albert Mobilio; an interview with Brainard Carey, WYBCX Yale University Radio; a feature in The Woven Tale Press, a print and on-line publication; on YouTube with The Large Glass; and also an interview and feature in the International Art Magazine Suboart. Most recently I was featured in Meg Hitchcock’s Art Blog/Reviews in conjunction with my most recent show, at Field Projects in Chelsea New York. I have worked in various mediums over the years, but when the pandemic hit, I found myself knitting. At first it was just a comforting pastime, but the knitted pieces have ended up as components of my art work, along with cord filler, fabric and paint on wood panels. In returning to a two-dimensional rectangle, it seems in some ways that my work has come full circle, while, at the same time, it is expanding in the way I integrate materials and in the materials I use.
I currently have a solo exhibition, This Is Not Rope, at Field Projects in Chelsea, New York, while simultaneously showing a collection of smaller works in another solo exhibition, Slip/Slide, at 490 Atlantic in Brooklyn. I am continually grateful for the opportunity to show my work in both New York City and the Hudson Valley, and for the positive feedback I have received in articles, blogs and from nother artists.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is owning the urge to create-and that what you chose to create can impact another human being.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I believe it is essential to find and have something that gives you passion. Once you find it, it can make life worth living.
My life has been about creating and it gives me reason to live.
No matter how the outside world sees me, I see myself as a success because I have something which propels me into life.

People who are not involved with any form of creativity or something that gives them passion and joy in life, cannot understand that the drive and passion opens up a world of curiosity, questions, and joy.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.susanmastrangelo.com
• Instagram: susanmastrangelo
• Facebook: Susan Mastrangelo

Image Credits

The photographs of myself in my studio are by Shukria Bayan
The photographs of individual paintings are by Alan Weiner
The personal self portrait iin front of my painting, Hope is taken by Jim Edwards