Suzanne Anker

American artist and researcher Suzanne Anker, born in 1946 in New York, is a pioneer in Bio Art, with her projects in the intersection between art and biologic sciences. Through her work, she investigates and comments on the recent alterations in nature, while speculating on the future of the present development of the species and the production of food by humans. Many of her works, exclusively artistic, are created in a laboratory, with scientific tools and methods. With a special interest in genetics, climate change, species extinction or toxic degradation, her projects wish to raise awareness to the beauty and complexity of life and to some of the latest developments in science. Thus, the artist shows through photography, installation and the use of biological materials, that organic and mineral beings can have surprising colours and shapes and that nature is, in a certain way, out of our control, a circumstance for which we should have a greater sense of responsibility.

Her projects have been the object of solo exhibitions in institutions like the Everson Museum of Art, in New York, in 2019; Daejeon Biennale in Korea, in 2017; Chronus Art Center in Shanghai, China, in 2014; Parrish Art Museum in New York, in 2016; ZKM I Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2015; Today Art Museum in Beijing in China, in 2015; and J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, USA, in 2001. Her work is part of the collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, New York Public Library, University of Colorado Museum, Whitney Museum, among others.

Her books include The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, with co-authorship by sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, as well as Visual Culture and Bioscience, co-published by the University of Maryland and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington.

Anker is also responsible for the department of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York since 2005, and there she continues to interlace traditional and experimental means of communications in a new digital initiative of her department and at the SVA Bio Art Laboratory.

 

DC, April 2021