Susan kae Grant

Susan kae Grant (born 1954) is an American artist and educator. Her work includes cinematic, staged photographic tableaux and portraits, as well as artist's books. Critics noted her early series for their use of vivid color and emotionally charged scenarios concerned with gender and sexual politics. Since the 2000s, she has focused on black-and-white imagery that uses shadow as a metaphor to explore perceptual aspects of dreams and memory. Victoria & Albert Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and George Eastman Museum, among others. She has exhibited at institutions including the Smithsonian, Center for Book Arts, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and Center for Creative Photography. Grant is based in Dallas, Texas.

Early life and career Grant was born in 1954 in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. She attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, earning a BS in art and art education (1976) and an MFA in photography and book arts (1979). After graduating, she taught at Wayne State University in Detroit, before moving to Dallas to teach at Texas Woman's University (TWU) in 1981. She was a professor and head of photography and book arts at TWU until 2017 when she retired as Cornaro Professor of Visual Art, Emerita.

Grant has had solo exhibitions at the Kansas City Art Institute (1989), Anchorage Museum (1997), Houston Center for Photography (2001), Conduit Gallery in Dallas (2002–20) and Grace Museum (2023), among other venues. In 2007, a thirty-year retrospective of her work was held at McKinney Avenue Contemporary in Dallas. Her books are autobiographical works that often involve research and incorporate letterpress and digital technologies, handmade papers, photographic imagery, text and unconventional materials such as cowhide, lead, fur and vinyl. The orchestrated interplay of shadow gestures and props on a screen was inspired by sleep laboratory research (conducted on Grant in collaboration with Dr. John Herman at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center), dream recordings and descriptions, memory and journal sketches. Her Collective Ruminations series (2020), completed during the COVID-19 pandemic, was a departure from high-contrast to highly patterned, white-on-white imagery juxtaposing location-shot trees with illustrations appropriated from historical dictionaries and encyclopedias. Borne out of personal experience (retirement from teaching, family deaths, meditation) and an interest in near-death experience (and its association with white light), these works metaphorically convey a sense of self-reflection, universality, vulnerability and beauty interrupted by intrusive thought according to critic Steve Carter. Radio-Active Substances (1994–7) is a memorial to the life of Marie Curie and examination of feminist issues, created for the Smithsonian exhibition "Science and the Artist's Book." Along with quotes and illustrations by Curie, it features a cover and pages made of lead sheeting and a box whose lid holds test tubes containing printed scrolls—materials that suggest themes of danger, illness, exploration and destruction. and Southeast Museum of Photography.

Recognition Grant's work belongs to the public collections of the Boston Athenaeum, Center for Creative Photography, Ringling Museum, Smithsonian Institution, PhotoNOLA Review Prize (2014, third place; 2017, second place), and inclusion on the 2014 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50. She has received teaching awards from the National Society for Photographic Education and Texas Woman's University, among other institutions. In 2003, the Dallas Area Rapid Transit commissioned her to design its Parkland station; completed in 2010, her work included windscreens of shadow images and texts, station paving, color scheme and column design, and landscaping.