MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program
It seems that I have always been concerned with seeing. My practice as an artist, muralist, activist and clinical psychologist revolves around making seen what is hidden, secret and denied and the subsequent implications of revelation.
My skills are woven together through an interdisciplinary approach with an emphasis on community, social justice and critical thinking. I am interested in finding what is strategic, resilient, and sustainable. What is the balancing point between personal/individual and public/community work. The projects outlined below are intertwined through an interdisciplinary psychosocial practice of imagining, wherein the psychology of communities, individuals and physical spaces are impacted.
My practice as a socially engaged artist began primarily as a muralist and social worker 25 years ago in San Francisco. I have worked in a multitude of formats including: murals in paint, tile, digital photography; video, multimedia installations and presentations, writings, bookmaking, and web based work; with a wide range of populations including: youth incarcerated in juvenile hall to adults in prison; homeless youth and adults; runaway youth; underserved people, developmentally disabled adults; and people struggling with psychological challenges. These projects have exemplified the potency of art to build relationships and to make communities visible that often are invisible and disenfranchised. I will describe a couple of the most pivotal projects in detail:
From 1998-2000, I was the first director of Project YIELD (Youth in Education and Leadership Development), a program of the Museum of Children’s Art (MOCHA). Project YIELD (PY) was a new after-school arts program that sought to provide interdisciplinary wrap-around services to a public housing project in West Oakland, an underserved neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay Area. PY partnered with several local organizations to provide programming that included: art, dance, music and martial arts classes, food distribution, referrals, counseling and advocacy. PY organized major cultural festivals, painted murals on all four exterior walls of its community center, and created 60 banners that are still hanging on West Grand Avenue. The banners are all that remain of the housing project community, ghostly reminders of the several hundred people who were evicted to make way for HUD Hope VI urban renewal program. I analyzed the impact and psychosocial dynamics of Project YIELD for my dissertation which was entitled: The Haunted Housing Project, An Investigation of the Psychosocial Geography of a Community Art and Youth Development Program. The YIELD project became the basis for my in-depth study of the ways collaborative public art making can be part of the critical empowerment of youth and communities, who is this case were experiencing traumatic oppressions that included the destruction of their community.
In 1989, I was a founding member of Break the Silence Mural Project (BTS), a group of four Jewish American women artists who were invited to Palestine to paint community murals. BTS lived with a family in a refugee camp for three months, and painted half a dozen collaborative murals in refugee camps, childcare and cultural centers. BTS is based on the idea that through art boundaries can be crossed resulting in greater understanding and social transformation. BTS is an extensive and ongoing project, which continues working towards a just peace in the Middle East. Projects currently take place in the West Bank, Gaza and the United States, in the creation of murals; videos; local, national and international slide and power-point presentations; multimedia projects, articles and websites in an effort to reach and engage as many people as possible.
I am constantly working at the borders and intersections of the individual and society, of trauma and resilience. In the media of film, video, installation, performance and painting, I often use the body as a metaphor and site of these dynamics. I have created biographical performance videos, intimate installations in gallery settings, and personal reflections on the social/community projects described above. Most recently, I am working on a public art series of large monochromatically painted contortion and trapeze figures that are then cut out of plywood and mounted publicly. The current incarnation of this work will be two figures that total 25ft. x 35ft that will be installed in the Mission district of San Francisco.
My research interests focus on the articulation and analysis of trauma, creativity and resilience. The data I am working with currently includes the public art process with Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and Gaza, and collaborative art/organizing projects in West Oakland, California. I will be on a panel in November 2005 at the Association for Psychoanalysis Culture and Society Conference discussing this work.
Teaching is one of the great joys of my life, and is a practice that I continuously learn from. My approach to pedagogy is student centered, outcome oriented and project based. I strive to provide opportunities for creative and analytical thinking for and with my students. The principle that students who are actively engaged with the world can become artists with skills critical to making a difference animates my teaching practice. My years of experience working in diverse social contexts have honed my ability to work cross culturally. I have witnessed the stunning intimacy of the personal and political countless times and have become sensitive, in practical ways, to the dynamics of power and privilege and to my position within them. I consider teaching to be an honor of the highest level.
Currently I direct the academic support program at the San Francisco Art Institute where I counsel students with learning disabilities and other challenges to their academic, verbal and written performance. I am an adjunct instructor at the University of San Francisco teaching muralism and drawing and co-direct Break the Silence Mural Project.
Educational Background: PhD, MA, Clinical Psychology, Wright Institute, Berkeley, CA; MA Interdisciplinary Arts, San Francisco State University; BA, Studio Art, Sociology, State University of New York at Binghamtom, Binghamtom, NY.
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Susan Greene, MA, PhD