ART and POLITICS NOW

Susan Noyes Platt was born in New York City. She grew up on the streets of Manhattan and learned to love grit. She played in Gramercy Park which had absolutely no provision for children. The ground was harsh pebbles, the grass surrounded by hedges. She was repeatedly expelled for breaking the rules.

She first became interested in art as a student at Friends Seminary, a Quaker School that encouraged equality. All the girls took shop, all the boys took art, there was no home economics for anyone. When she almost won an award at the age of 9 for a design for Christmas card, her love of art began.

She left NYC when she was 18 to go to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts because she loved the idea of being out in the country. She went there as an English major but quickly switched to art history after discovering that the English faculty was mainly interested in grammar.  Classics in translation was her favorite course, though.

She started studying archeology, inspired by brilliant teachers in college, but after going on one archeological dig she realized that the combination of watching other people digging in the dirt and making technical notations was not her talent. But she spent a year in Italy studying art history and became fluent in Italian. As a result she can pretend to speak and understand Spanish and French as well.

She became interested in contemporary art when working at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, with Daniel Robbins. She met Richard Serra, whose one ton lead sculpture called House of Cards (500 pounds on each side), collapsed in the museum, almost killing a guard. She decided that the museum world was not for her either.

So she got a Masters degree  at Brown University and then a Ph.D. at the University of Texas, Austin, and began an academic career as a Professor of Twentieth Century art with a parallel career as an art critic.  As a Professor of art history with an emphasis on the history of twentieth century art criticism, she taught at Mills College in  California, Washington State University, Texas,  the University of North Texas and back to Washington State with off and on affiliation with the University of Washington, The Evergreen State College and Seattle Central Community College.  She received tenure at two universities. Her dissertation was published as Modernism in the 1920s UMI Research Press, 1985. Her second book , Art and Politics in the 1930s, Midmarch Arts Press, 1999, led her from modernism into an interest in the connection of politics and art.

After publishing many articles that focused on the history of art criticism in the US she made an abrupt change of direction as a result of receiving a Fulbright Fellowship to teach American art in 1999 in Istanbul Turkey. In Istanbul she met many contemporary artists and began to write about contemporary art in the Middle East as well as global art at Biennials.

Today, she is based in Seattle and her main interest is in writing about art that engages social issues. That is the subject of her new book Art and Politics Now, Cultural Activism in a Time of Crisis. Midmarch 2011. The book includes art from throughout the world, reflecting her own migration from studying art in the US to writing about contemporary art from all over the world. She has also curated three exhibitions, “The Global Art Coalition,” The Art of Selma Waldman” and “Cultural Activism in at Time of Crisis” at the M. Rosetta Hunter Gallery, Seattle Central Community College directed by Ken Matsudaira. She currently writes for Sculpture Magazine, and several online publications as well as her own blog on www.artandpoliticsnow.com