Susie Brandt: Whereabouts?

June 8 - August 10

Susie Brandt: Whereabouts? features artworks spanning several decades of the artist’s career regarding time, location and the landscape through textile explorations of place. Susie Brandt has long worked across textile media – engaging with techniques of stitching, weaving, rug hooking, fabric printing and lacemaking often using found, repurposed and unconventional materials. Her work responds to the immediate circumstances of their making – to point to their whereabouts – along with such ideas as the safety of orange, the body as found object, dendrochronology, polka dots as atmosphere, algorithms of color, and walking as devotion.

In conjunction with the Whereabouts? exhibition at SPEEDWELL Contemporary, Brandt will offer a workshop in collaboration with Waterville Creates in Waterville, Maine on July 18 from 3-5pm. Ropewalk is a unique opportunity to transform discarded clothing into long and strong lengths of rope by repurposing worn-out garments into vibrant yarn, breathing new life into forgotten textiles. In 2016 Brandt staged Ropewalk at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Susie Brandt is based in Rockland, Maine and in the Southern Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. During much of the 90’s, she made large scale installation works with her artist/sister, Betsy Brandt and she continues to collaborate with others. Most recent projects involve communal raffle quilts and postcards. Brandt has curated and co-curated exhibitions of other artists including Warren Seelig, Lenore Tawney, Sandra Brownlee, and Rowland Ricketts.

Brandt’s work has been included in solo exhibitions at the University of Maryland, the International Fiber Art Fair at the Hangaram Art Museum in Seoul, Korea, the Grizzly Grizzly Gallery in Philadelphia, Schweinfurth Art Center in Auburn, NY and Project 1628, Baltimore, MD, Five Stumps was shown at The Delaware Center for Contemporary Art in Wilmington. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA, the Wisconsin Museum of Quilts and Fiber Arts in Cedarburg, WI, Cardinal Space Gallery in Baltimore, MD, the Lewis Gallery, Portland Public Library in Portland, ME, Texas Tech University in Lubbock, and 33 Arts Center in Baltimore.

Her art is in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, and the Albany Institute of History and Art, among others. Brandt is the recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council and Creative Capital. She holds a BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) emeritus professor.

For two years, over the course of the pandemic, she worked remotely with 75 others to stitch 14 quilts to raffle for various causes. Many of those quilts comprised the exhibition Quilting in the Age of the Pandemic at Lake George Arts Project in Lake George, NY (2022) and Praxis Gallery in Cleveland, OH (2023) before they were raffled.

Image above: Dashed Self-Portrait Rug, 2019, Red Heart acrylic yarn; hand woven, 92 ½ x 17.” Photo by Dan Meyers
Image top: Sifter, 2015, Aloha shirt bits netted in safety orange thread, 96 x 96.” Photo by Dan Meyer