Black Mountain College Veteran’s Curiosity Spurs Her Art
“Susan Weil: Time’s Pace,” installation view at Sundaram Tagore Gallery, with “Georgia” (2013), left, and “Perspectacle” (2013), right (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted)
The brilliant and inventive mind of Susan Weil is on full display at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery through June 15. At 83, Weil has lived at the epicenter of the New York art world since the early 1950s, and although her art has been relatively overshadowed by that of her contemporaries, Weil’s current show has the makings of her best.
Weil was born in New York City in 1930 and grew up on Outer Island, NY. She came of age as an artist just as the postwar New York School was gaining steam. While attending the Académie Julian in Paris in 1948, she met Robert Rauschenberg, and for a time they became an inseparable pair. He followed her to Black Mountain College, both studying under Josef Albers. “I was still a teenager at Black Mountain,” Weil said in an interview years ago. “I had a defensive response to Albers’s authoritarian, exacting style. And yet I can see how his teachings have influenced me to this day.” Rauschenberg and Weil returned to New York and began participating in the extraordinary art scene of the time. “The interdisciplinary collaborations that we had enjoyed at Black Mountain were also blossoming in New York with events that combined dance, photography, and music,” Weil said. “Fences separating different disciplines came down.” Rauschenberg and Weil shared their thoughts and work with de Kooning, Kline, Tworkov, and others.
The pair spent the summer of 1949 on Outer Island. They bought a roll of blueprint paper and began staging compositions, exposing the paper to sunlight (Weil had experimented with cyanotypes since she was a child). The results of the collaboration were “thrilling,” according to the artist — Bonwit Teller used them in their department store windows; Life magazine published them in an article in April 1951; and the next month one was shown in the exhibition Abstraction in Photography at the Museum of Modern Art.
