Bio
Susanna Bluhm is a queer landscape-based artist who makes semi-abstract paintings. Raised with her brother in a suburb of Los Angeles by a therapist mother and engineer father, her Mexican grandmother was the anchor of family culture and her gay artist uncle an early source of inspiration and affirmation. Lured by lush rainy redwoods and a 24hour-access painting studio, she earned her BA in Studio Art from Humboldt State University. After a break from school that featured retail jobs, guarding museum art, and heartbreak, she moved to the cornfields of Illinois for graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she earned her MFA in painting, heard tornado sirens, gained rich teaching experience and met her future wife. After doing art residencies at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and at the Karl Hofer Gesellschaft in Berlin, she moved to Seattle where she was a member of SOIL artist-run gallery for five years, was the 2014 recipient of the Neddy Artist Award in Painting, worked as a gallery director at a nonprofit gallery, and had a live human pulled out of her body (not in that order). Most recently, she completed an MA degree in Comparative Religion at the University of Washington in Seattle, with a major in Judaism and a minor in German Studies. Her thesis was titled “Making Landscape: A Tradition of Collaboration with the More-than-Human World in the Hebrew Bible and Jewish Literature.” She is represented by J. Rinehart Gallery in Seattle. She lives in Seattle with her wife and son.