Born into a non-religious Jewish family, Sussman started photographing when she was about 10 years old. In a lecture given in 2019 at the Center for the Study of World Religions of Harvard Divinity School, she explained: "I grew up in a pretty abusive family, pretty rough childhood. And nature was one of the first things that I really connected with. It really without knowing it became a guiding force for me".[1]
She graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York with a BFA, studied at the Bard College MFA program, and began a practice-based fine arts PhD at Central Saint Martins in London. Sussman is a Guggenheim and MacDowell Colony Fellow, spoke about her work at the TEDGlobal conference in 2010, and was a 2016 TED Resident.[2] Sussman's interdisciplinary project "The Oldest Living Things in the World," has been featured in the media all over the world, including the New Yorker,[3] New York Times,[4] Wall Street Journal,[5] CNN,[6] The Guardian,[7] NPR's Picture Show,[8] New Scientist,[9] as well as publications in China, Brazil, New Zealand, and throughout Europe.
In 2008 critic Jerry Saltz cited her work as the "best photography that slipped under the radar" in New York Magazine,[10] having stated in the exhibition review:
“These stately pictures quiet the soul: You enter a reverie wondering how these organisms managed to live so long and if there’s anything in them that might help us stave off the inevitable…Sussman brings you to the place where science, beauty, and eternity meet” [11]
Sussman continues to make artwork about connecting personal time to cosmic time[12] through new installation-based works. These include a sand mandala of the Cosmic microwave background at the New Museum Los Gatos, the destruction of which was covered by WIRED Magazine, a handwritten timeline of the history of the spacetime continuum at MASS MoCA,[13] and Sidewalk Kintsukuroi, a contemporary take on the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, at the Des Moines Art Center.[14]
From 2004 to 2014, Sussman researched, worked with biologists, and traveled all over the world to find and photograph continuously living organisms 2,000 years old and older.[16] Sussman says "The project is part art and part science. There's an environmental component. And I'm also trying to create a means in which to step outside our quotidian experience of time and to start to consider a deeper timescale. I selected 2,000 years as my minimum age because I wanted to start at what we consider to be year zero and work back from there."[17]
Her book of the same title was published April 2014, containing essays from Hans Ulrich Obrist and Carl Zimmer, and is a New York Times Bestseller.[18] In his essay, Hans Ulrich Obrist states:
"What sets Sussman apart from other conceptual artists is that her research project is closely related to the research of a scientist....the Oldest Living Things is a category that is defined by curiosity, humane character, a fascination with deep time, and the courage of an explorer"[19]
The book is currently in print in Complex and Simple Chinese, Korean, and German.[5]
Awards and nominations
Guggenheim Fellowship, Photography, 2014
LACMA Lab Art + Tech grant, 2014
NYFA Fellowship, Photography, 2013
Prix Pictet nomination, London/Geneva 2009, 2010, 2011
British Council Darwin Now Award, Finalist. London, 2009
University of Pennsylvania, Graduate Humanities Forum on Origins, 2008
Exhibitions
Des Moines Art Center: Alchemy: Transformations in Gold. Sidewalk Kintsukuroi, acquisition. Feb 17
New Museum Los Gatos: New works by SETI Artists, Cosmic Microwave Mandala. Oct 16 – Mar 17
MASS MoCA: Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder, May 2016– Mar 2017
MASS MoCA: The Space Between, Sidewalk Kintsukuroi, permanent installation, April 2016
