Susan Firestone

Susan Firestone was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1946.  She received her B.A. from Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.  She continued her studies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.  In 1973 she received her M.F.A. in painting at the American University, Washington, D.C., and she attended the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C., in 1977.  She has exhibited widely and has studios in New York and Washington, D.C.  Firestone works in painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking, and her materials – from transformers and auto parts to saw blades and tarot cards – hint at her idiosyncratic blend of Eastern mysticism and Western materialism.  Firestone sees the artist as a craftsperson in contemporary society and tools as the artifacts of today.  Her dreamy images often incorporate pictographs and electronically timed sequences of word variations.  The goddess as muse and augur is a common motif, and since 2001 she has been making plaster and bronze casts of the human form.  Her work, which includes Pop Art elements and pays homage to Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, is also marked by a distinctly poetic approach.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.