About

Bio
Originally from California, Susan Cooper has lived in Denver since 1975. She received her MA and BA degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and has been a professional artist ever since.
Most of Susan’s current work is for public art. The art is site specific with budgets ranging from $30,000 to 1,000,000. One early major major work is in Denver’s City/ County Building Rotunda and consists of 2 high relief murals that measure 14 feet by 17 feet by 8 inches each. Another significant project was doing design work for 20 miles of the RTD, Regional Transportation District, of the Metropolitan Denver Light Rail system for 13 stations. She has completed around 30 public projects in California, Colorado, Missouri and Nebraska was an artist in residence in Roswell, New Mexico and at Yaddo, New York. Her work is in collections of several museums, corporations, and private and public collections. A 525 foot bridge railing for Stockton, CA, is soon to be installed. Also in progress are 2 murals for a youth center in Anchorage and a mural/bench in a Denver Park. An artist-in-residency is planned for October of 2014.
Her media include steel copper, LED lighting, concrete, polycarbonate, wood, bronze, plexiglas, and aluminum. Cooper has completed a large installation for St. Louis, MO; a 100 foot mixed media mural for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust; concrete and granite shelter for the University of Nebraska; light sculpture for the Ritz Theatre in Jacksonville, FL; 525 foot steel bridge railings for Stockton, CA; and several installations in Colorado at universities, parks, an armory, and the City and County Building of Denver. She was on the design team for a 20 mile light rail expansion in metropolitan Denver for 13 stations.
Susan is also a studio artist of painting and sculpture whose work has been exhibited in Colorado, California, Washington DC, and New York.
Excerpt from “Vanishing Points” catalogue essay for installation, RECOLLECTION Cooper’s work performs both a documentary and an esthetic function. Her reliefs are removed from reality – the buildings are out of context, floating in a new placer
all their own, created by the artist. Relief – positioned between painting and sculpture – seems the right choice for the installation. Pushed forward from the passive picture plane, it is a liminal medium, between two and three dimensions, reflecting the liminal place of memory between part and present. It is compatible with the current postmodern, Post-Holocaust climate, in which, as Eric Santner remarks in a different context, “one identifies with and remains open to the traumas of history in order to gain a non-cynical distance on the
present.” – Lucy R. Lippard