Susan R. Kirshenbaum

Bio

Susan R. Kirshenbaum is a San Francisco-based figurative artist and curator. She was encouraged early in life to pursue art and photography growing up in her family’s art school, the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, PA, where she studied and worked. She moved to the Bay Area in her 20s where she studied video and performance art at SFAI. Moving to Hawaii, NYC, and then back to the Bay, Kirshenbaum pursued a career as a creative director for marketing and branding before returning to her life-long art calling. She maintains a full-time art practice out of her SOMA studio. Always an avid traveler, she and her husband (and cats) took a two-year sabbatical to live and study in Catalonia, Spain.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Susan R. Kirshenbaum continues to exhibit her work in numerous group and solo shows. Her pieces are in collections nationally and internationally. She is active in Bay Area galleries and serves on the Board of SFWA. In 2020 she founded The Invisibility Collective, a multi-generational, multi-disciplinary, social practice group of bi-coastal artists and organized their inaugural exhibition. 

“My art conveys our everyday humanity and, ideally, helps motivate people to embrace their human-ness.” 

With an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil as her primary art tools now she creates “digital original art”. Working from live models, she often layers her drawings with her abstract paintings and/or her photographs to create digital collages. Her work can be characterized as colorful, graphic, gestural, sensual, and fluid. It conveys a frankness which feels intimate and natural. Subjects are powerful women, non-binary people, and an occasional male – who come across as strong, decisive, confident, and unique individuals – this is her underlying, feminist narrative. Subjects are usually naked but are completely comfortable in their skins. Kirshenbaum poses the question to her viewers: “Are you at home in your body? Do you want to be?” Nudity is not an issue. Body love is.