Susan Holt

About the Artist

  Susan M. Holt, BIO Susan Holt is the Director of the Mosely Gallery at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. She has been an instructor of art for 18 years, teaching Drawing, Design, Art Appreciation and Art History and has led several study abroad art programs in Italy. Susan was born and raised in St. Louis, Mo. She received her BFA in painting at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she studied with Rudolf Arnheim and Gerome Kamrowski. After graduation she worked as a graphic designer and travelled to Europe. She moved permanently to Rome, where she met her Chilean husband, did some free-lance design work, taught English and raised a family. Returning to the U.S. she received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts where she studied with Faith Wilding and Humberto Ramirez. In response to changing cultural contexts, Susan’s art work over the decades has varied in media, style and intention, but common threads reside within. As an undergraduate in the late ‘70s formalism reigned. Her realistic figurative representation in drawing, painting and sculpture gave way to abstraction dominated by a strong interest in color and expressive mark making. Later, postmodernism urged her to seek and add relevant content to her work. In grad school her research in semiotics and the psychology of identity led her to search for new materials such as light, shadow, translucent fabrics, screening, netting, etc. The medium of installation opened exciting opportunities for the work to come off the wall and podium and into a space where viewers could interact directly. More recently she has done several collaborative pieces based on collective memory and construction of a sense of place. For many years she has been actively involved in public art initiatives related to the revitalization of downtown Salisbury, Maryland, where she lives with her family.