SUSANNE SLAVICK
"ANTHEM"
May 13 - August 31, 2010
Like many cities across the nation, St. Louis suffers from increasing unemployment and flat or declining residential and commercial real estate markets. In ANTHEM, images of dilapidated architecture mirror urban and economic decline, filling the windows of a neatly maintained structure. Whether we succumb to or surpass a hardscrabble existence is often a choice that is not ours alone to make. Revival cannot be enacted alone; it must be collective and inclusive.
My recent work transforms images of destruction and devastation into sites of possible renewal. Scenes of construction or cultivation emerge from heaps of rubble, raided treasures and assaults of all kinds. Altering these images digitally or manually is my attempt at empathic restitution, at recognizing what has been decimated without surrendering to it. As Leonard Cohen’s moving Anthem lyrics proclaim: 'Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.'
My grandfather, Henry Slavick, was born in St. Louis. It is where he met my grandmother, Lenore O’Hara, who taught me the names of flowers and to whom I dedicate this piece. The dogwood, the state tree of Missouri, was her favorite bloom.
For more information on Susanne Slavick’s work, visit
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For more information on her R&R(…&R) series, visit
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Susanne Slavick is an artist whose imagery relies on sources ranging from antiquated cartography to Persian miniatures to internet documentation of sites in conflict. With the crossed eyes of a realist and idealist, her recent paintings and works on paper are attempts at empathic restitution, gestures of recognition, remorse and recovery in face of devastation.
Slavick is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon. Graduating from Yale University in 1978, she subsequently studied at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and earned her MFA at Tyler School of Art in Rome and Philadelphia. Slavick has exhibited in museums and galleries in across the country as well as in Europe and Asia. Her paintings have been recognized through an artist fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and four awards from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2008, she was designated “Artist of the Year” by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts where she premiered “R&R(…&R)”. Works from this ongoing series of works on paper have traveled to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Rutgers University, the Chicago Cultural Center, Bradley University and Art Chicago through Zolla Lieberman Gallery. Her solo show at McDonough Museum of Art in Youngstown, Ohio opens in September, 2011.
Susanne Slavick in her Pittsburgh studio, 2010