Talk:Susannah Hays

Would like to get a subpage going for looking at a rewrite.Steve Lovelace (talk) 06:13, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

ALTERNATE DRAFT VERSION 1
Susannah Hays is an American artist and educator known for her contributions in book arts and fine art photography, especially for her innovative work with cameraless and historical processes. Her books and photographs have been displayed in numerous galleries and institutions, and she has taught courses at universities in the U.S. and abroad.

Biography
Born in Boston Massachusetts, Hays moved to California in 1978 to attend Mills College, where she received a BA in American Studies (1982). Over the next two decades, she interspersed work, travel and studies, earning an MFA in Photography from San Francisco Art Institute (2000) and an MA in Design from University of California, Berkeley (2002). While working towards her MA, she was awarded the Eisner Prize for Photography (2001). She is currently a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies at UC Berkeley. In 2012, she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she currently resides.

Career
From 1984 to 1989 Hays was the assistant director of Daedalus, a paper conservation laboratory in Oakland California. In 1990, she formed the sole proprietorship Works on Paper, a conservation laboratory and artist’s book design and production studio (1990-2004). In 1996, she was invited to curate the national exhibition Science Imagined for Berkeley Art Center; and in 2007, she curated Zero In Zero Out for the Donna Seager Gallery. Her teaching career began following her MFA, co-teaching Visual-Autobiography with Hertha D. Sweet Wong and Lewis Watts at UC Berekeley. She then joined the faculty of San Francisco Art Institute, teaching photographic technique, history of photography, photo book arts, and special topics courses (2002-2012). Of the latter, Topologies and Embodied Camera, which grew out of Visual-Autobiography and her own work, "examine how the medium of photography functions to reconcile two disparate realities original to man: the force of mechanical apparatus and the shaping of in-formed, formless matter into authentic visionary representations." While at San Francisco Art Institute, she also taught courses at UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, and  San Francisco Center for the Book. In 2012, she was awarded an artist in residency at  Shenkar College of Art and Design in Ramat Gan, Israel and Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, in Venice Italy. In 2013-14 she also taught philosophy and aesthetics at Leuphana Universität in Lüneburg Germany. She is currently contributing faculty at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Works
Hays' work has appeared in many solo and group exhibitions, most notably at Scott Nichols Gallery in San Francisco, Donna Seager Gallery in Marin, California, and Photo-Eye Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico where her work continues to be represented today. Her work is also held in the collections of many public and private institutions, including Stanford University, which acquired her archive in 2009.

Solo Exhibitions

 * Vessels of Light, Scott Nichols Gallery (2001)
 * In/Visible Cosmos, Scott Nichols Gallery (2002)
 * Everyday Constellations, Townsend Center for the Humanities, Berkeley, CA (2002)
 * Topologies, Scott Nichols Gallery (2004)
 * Nature Word ~ Verbe Nature, None Such Space, Oakland, CA (2008)
 * Verniciatura, Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venezia, Italy (2014)

Collections

 * The New York Public Library Spencer Collection New York, New York
 * Mills College Library Heller Rare Book Room Oakland, California
 * Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas
 * New Mexico Museum of Art Santa Fe, New Mexico
 * Paul Sack Collection San Francisco, California
 * Santa Barbara Museum of Art Santa Barbara, California
 * Stanford University Cecil H. Green Library Stanford, California (major acquisition)
 * University of California Berkeley Environmental Design Library
 * Yale Art Gallery New Haven, Connecticut
 * Yale Haas Book Art Collection New Haven, Connecticut
 * Yale Beinecke Library of American Literature New Haven, Connecticut

Articles and Reviews

 * New Mexico Museum of Art, Directly from Nature
 * Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Verniciatura
 * None-Such Space, Nature Word ~ Verbe Nature
 * Townsend Center for the Humanities, Everyday Constellations
 * Artists Television Access, Penumbra
 * Berkeley Science Review, Through the Looking Glass