Susan Mastrangelo

Susan Mastrangelo, Shining Lights, knitting, recycled fabric, upholstery cord, acrylic paint on wood panel, 60" x 48", 2020.

Susan Mastrangelo (born 1951) is an American visual artist and educator whose artwork has included mixed-media paintings, sculpture, installations and printmaking. Her earlier work centered on sculpture and installations, most commonly expressive, sculpted heads and flat, stylized groupings of figures that ranged freely between representation and abstraction. Critics suggest that since 2015, her paintings, collages and monoprints have embraced immediacy, organic abstract form, and diverse materials including knitting, upholstery cord, recycled patterned fabrics and paint. She is based in Brooklyn and Catskill, New York.

Early life and career Mastrangelo was born in 1951 in New York City, and raised there and in Washington DC. She received formal training in painting (e.g., still lifes, figurative compositions, landscapes) at the New York Studio School (1973) and Kansas City Art Institute, receiving a BFA from the former in 1974.

In addition to her artmaking, Mastrangelo taught at the Buckley School in New York City from 1991 to 2017, and chaired its art department from 2000 to 2017. On an individual level, critics noted them for their lumpy humor and unnerving emotional impact, while describing the effect en masse as both macabre and communal. For the 2003, New York Vision Festival, Mastrangelo created an installation of large-scale, highly hung heads constructed out of plaster, wood, paint, burlap, hemp, wire and resin that reviewer Tina Seligman likened to departed souls or an ancient Greek chorus "silently echoing despair, anger, strength and resilience." In 2019, after turning to other work for more than a decade, she returned to the heads in installations at the City-Museum of Neuötting and Schauraum K3 in Germany. Taking a range of forms—flat, freestanding fiberglass and fabric figures, drawings on mylar or hanging scrim, linocut prints Her monoprints exhibit a similar impulse, featuring simple organic shapes made with mylar templates that overlap through multiple printings to create a sense of immediacy and spiraling, urban energy and color (e.g., Breaking Barriers #7, 2020). Working intuitively, she "drew" on wood panels with upholstery cording of various weights using the energy of robust, sinuous lines to dictate the rhythms, biomorphic shapes and voids of the compositions (e.g., Shining Lights, 2021). Over these drawings, she painted and collaged with patterned fabrics and meshes, developing a dense, complex pictorial vocabulary with trompe l'oeil, shadowing, depth and textural effects.