Suzanne Anker

Her practice investigates the ways in which Nature is being altered in the 21st century.

Concerned with genetics, climate change, species extinction and toxic degradation, her work calls attention to the beauty of life and the "necessity for enlightened thinking about Nature's 'tangled bank'."

Anker frequently assembles with "pre-defined and found materials" botanical specimens, medical museum artifacts, laboratory apparatus, microscopic images and geological specimens.

Suzanne Anker (born August 6, 1946) is an American visual artist and theorist.

Considered a pioneer in Bio Art., she has been working on the relationship of art and the biological sciences for more than twenty five years.

Suzanne Anker was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 6, 1946.

She also completed independent Studies with Ad Reinhardt (1966-1967) and studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School (1968).

She lives with the artist Frank Gillette in Manhattan and East Hampton, NY.

Her choice of graduate school was determined by the fact that her first husband, Jeffrey Anker, M.D. was relieved of his duties to serve in the Vietnam War and instead work as a prison psychiatrist under the auspices of the U.S. Public Health Service.

It was in Colorado that Anker was introduced to the scale of Nature and its temporal aspects.

During the mid 70s to the mid 80s, Anker worked almost exclusively on sculptural handmade paper reliefs.

She started papermaking in 1974 on the basis of reading Dard Hunter's and Claire Romano's books.

In 1975 she worked with Garner Tullis at the Institute of Experimental Printmaking in Santa Cruz, California.

She earned a B.A. in Art from Brooklyn College of the City of New York and an M.F.A. from the University of Colorado in Boulder (1976).

The paper reliefs produced at his institute were exhibited at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City in 1976.

The same year, she participated in the North American Hand Papermaking exhibition organized by Richard Minsky at the Center for Book Arts in New York City.

From a background as a printmaker, Anker initially worked with cast paper, made in latex molds.

Subsequently, she incorporated limestone and fossils in her experiment with combinations of paper and stone.

For her 1979 solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Anker installed large limestone planks that extended from the interior to the exterior of the gallery.

The same year, she presented an installation of limestone and its residual chalk dust at P.S. 1's "A Great Big Drawing Show" curated by Alanna Heiss with artists Vito Acconci, Alice Aycock, Frank Gillette, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Serra, and others.

Suzanne Anker is considered "one of the pioneers in the broader field of art, science, and technology", particularly in the burgeoning field of Bio Art.

Bio Art is a practice that utilizes living organisms and life processes as an artistic medium.

Her work Gene Pool (1991) was featured in the 1992 article "The Consumption of Paradise" by Peggy Cyphers.

Her sculpture Cyber-chrome Chromosome from 1991 was included in the exhibition From Code to Commodity: Genetics and Visual Art at the New York Academy of Sciences in 2003.

In 1994, Suzanne Anker curated Gene Culture: Molecular Metaphor in Visual Art – one of the first art exhibitions on the subject of art and genetics – at Fordham University's Lincoln Center Campus in New York.

The exhibition investigated "the ways in which genetic imaging operates as aesthetic signs".

She previously chaired the SVA BFA Art History Department (2000-2005).

From 2004 to 2006, Suzanne Anker hosted twenty episodes of the Bio-Blurb Show, a 30-minute-long internet radio program originally broadcast on WPS1 Art Radio, in collaboration with MoMA.

The show focused on the intersection of art and the biological sciences, and the ethical and aesthetic dimensions therein.

It is currently archived on Alanna Heiss' Clocktower Productions.

Suzanne Anker is the Chair of the School of Visual Arts (SVA)'s BFA Fine Arts Department in New York City (2005-present).

In 2006, Anker co-curated the exhibition Neuroculture: Visual Art and the Brain, at the Westport Arts Center with Giovanni Frazzetto.

The exhibition presented an investigation of aspects of the human brain, and its attendant representations.

Suzanne Anker curated the exhibition Fundamentally human: contemporary art and neuroscience at the Pera Museum in Istanbul in 2011.

In 2011, Anker founded the SVA Bio Art Lab, the first Bio Art laboratory in a Fine Arts Department in the United States.

The SVA Bio Art Lab is located in Chelsea, New York City and has been conceived as a place where "scientific tools and techniques become methodologies in art practice".

Art / Knowledge / Theory is a book series that explores artistic modes of expression as forms of knowledge production.

Co-edited by Suzanne Anker and Sabine Flach and published by Peter Lang since 2013, "it focuses on transdisciplinary, epistemological and methodological approaches to contemporary art. Linking artistic and scientific practices, tools, techniques, and theories, the volumes investigate the cultures of aesthetics and science studies as they relate to works of art".

Published titles include:

Anker co-authored The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age with the American sociologist of science Dorothy Nelkin.