Biography

Artist Susan Leibovitz Steinman salvages materials directly from community waste streams to construct public art installations that connect common daily experiences to broader social issues. Projects include conceptual sculpture gardens that meld art, ecology and community action.

A 2 acre temporary (± 3 years) installation of recycled freeway materials and native plants on West Oakland's Mandela Parkway, Mandela Artscape (1998), symbolizes positive urban regeneration on new-found but degraded open space where the '89 earthquake collapsed an elevated freeway. It involved the unique cooperative participation of community residents, Caltrans, the City of Oakland, Merritt College and the Museum of Children's Art.

Her permanent commission for the City of Palo Alto, California Avenue, California Native (1997), recreates a native grassland meadow in a median strip. Hand painted banners of indigenous animals and plants display both their common and Latin names. Sierra granite stones double as benches. New brick sidewalk patterns are interlaid with 100 special bricks engraved with poetic text written by winners in a public contest (attracting 500+ entries) on, "What makes California California?"

In Urban Apple Orchard (1994-95) sponsored by the San Francisco Art Commission, Steinman worked with neighbors, teenagers, homeless people, and an urban garden action group to transform unutilized land under a freeway into a demonstration antique varietal apple orchard.

For San Francisco's waste transfer and recycling facility (NORCAL Sanitary Fill Company) she designed The River of Hopes and Dreams (1992), a permanent three-acre sculpture garden. as a model for reclamation, resource conservation, recycling, and community involvement. Almost one-hundred high school students contributed their art and ideas to it.

Susan was recently Awarded the 2000 Potrero Nuevo Prize in San Francisco, for "Gardens to Go"-- to design and install a prototype community organic food garden of portable sculptural raised beds using "zero waste" material; scheduled Summer 2000, for Oakland, CA.

Large-scale temporary environmental installation sites: Connemara Land Conservancy, Dallas, Texas; Euphrat Museum, Cupertino; Paradise Ridge Sculpture Grove, Santa Rosa; a New York State park on the Brooklyn waterfront; a tract home condemned for toxic waste, for Arts Benicia, California. Selected venues: Oakland Museum, the new San Francisco Main Public Library; SF Museum of Modern Art Rental Gallery; Bedford Art Center, Walnut Creek; Judah Magnes Museum, Berkeley; San Jose State University; Berkeley Art Commission public sites; a six-month collaborative work, For The Birds, for the City of Concord's downtown public square.

Also: Co-curated "Living in Balance" an environmental art exhibit at both the San Francisco International Airport and the Richmond (California) Art Center. Published "Directional Signs: A Compendium of Artists' Works" , a chapter within Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Suzanne Lacy, editor, (Bay Press, 1995). CoPublisher-Editor, Women Environmental Artists Directory. Taught at the Visual and Public Art Institute, California State University at Monterey Bay, and at California State University at Hayward.

For more information, please contact the artist at steinmanstudio@gmail.com