Susan Tessem

born 1943

BiographySpending most of her professional career as a professor, Susan Tessem’s artistic impact is most often understood in relation to the development of the art program at Washington College in Chesterton, Maryland. After a brief stint at the University of Delaware, Tessem took a position at Washington College and built that program up to what it is now from a storage closet tucked away in the theater department basement. Over the years, Tessem’s style shifted drastically. Beginning
in an abstract expressionist vein, her work became more decidedly geometric by the late 1960s. After working in Maryland for a number of years, Tessem settled into a style featuring softer edges that often incorporated more of the observable landscape around her. This later style, which largely sustained the rest of her career, never fully escaped her fascination with geometric form and the disruption of space. In this way, her 1968, Hard Grape represents an important precursor to her later style – one in which the overall aesthetic is one of hard-edged abstraction, but the manipulation of illusory space is heightened, and there is a tepid experimentation with softening her application of paint.

[For Consideration, 2020.112]

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