Susan Grace

Susan Grace is a painter who lives and works in Lawrence, KS. Although she studied painting informally in Athens, Greece, her academic background is primarily in literature and theater, and she taught courses in modern American and European literature at universities in the U.S. and at The American College of Greece in Athens, Greece.

While teaching, she always maintained an active studio practice regardless of where she was living. Upon returning to the U.S., she held a tenured faculty position at the University of Kansas until she left for a full-time artist studio practice. Her study of literature continues to inspire and influence her work.

Grace moves freely between representation and abstraction as she works with a variety of subject matter, including the figure, architecture, and the urban landscape. Regardless of the subject, she uses fragmentation, layering, and complexity to create multiple possibilities for interpretation and experience. Often a variety of images are fused within a single work, and recent paintings have incorporated text and random marks to enrich images both formally and conceptually.

Her work has been widely exhibited at galleries and museums throughout the U.S., such as ARC Gallery, Chicago; Macon Museum of Arts and Sciences, GA; World Trade Center, New Orleans; Kirkpatrick Center Museum Complex, Oklahoma City; Wichita Art Museum, KS; Neville Public Museum, Green Bay, WI; The Kentucky Museum, Bowling Green; and Riverside Art Museum, CA. She has received numerous awards for her work, and her paintings are in many private and public collections, including the Mulvane Art Museum, Washburn University, Topeka, KS and The Art of Emprise Collection, Wichita, KS.