ARTIST BIO

Susan Togut believes in the power of creativity to fully engage life, positively transforming its uncertainties and challenges. A public and gallery artist, educator, therapeutic facilitator and curator, she integrates personal perspectives and community-based, worldly concerns.

For 36 years she balanced her artistic evolution while facilitating community revitalization and individual vitality in community, educational and healthcare settings with people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities. For 24 she orchestrated many art programs, including individual and collaborative art, for people with illnesses and disabilities, such as traumatic brain injury, cancer, mental illness, dementia and autism. Upcoming she will establish an ongoing intergenerational visual arts program that includes public art. She earned a BFA from Washington University, St. Louis; an MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. 

Susan’s public and gallery art focuses on cycles of life, living with uncertainty, death, metamorphosis, regeneration and ascension, interweaving different realities. Her gallery and environmental work explores states of fragility and uncertainty that metamorphose into positive change. She creates paintings, dimensional wallpieces, sculptures, installations and outdoor contemplative places. These often interweave natural and ephemeral materials with illuminated painting. Her art is featured in solo and group exhibitions, sculpture gardens, along rail trails, in galleries, museums, hospitals and  private collections. Additionally, she orchestrates collaborative, community-based public art, writes and lectures about individual and community renewal through the arts. She’s received numerous grants over the years including Gottlieb, Rauschenberg, NYFA, Pollack Krasner and Ford Fellowships. 

In response to the pandemic, Susan created gallery works and public art environments. Crossroads; Transforming Uncertainty, 2020-ongoing, includes twenty installations on two sides of a rail trail in Voorheesville, NY. Transforming Uncertainty; Circles of Time is being cumulatively created in Mount Tremper; NY; 2021-ongoing. An upcoming Transforming Uncertainty Sanctuary will include contributions from diverse community members. It was inspired by the highly trafficked Healing Arbor  (1997-2017) which she created with those touched by cancer on the Kingston, NY waterfront. These public places embrace nature's cycles, addressing compelling themes while merging with and activating the landscape.