A Language Built by Hand and Memory
Susan Mastrangelo’s artistic practice stands as a sustained meditation on material, touch, and the slow intelligence of the hand. Born and raised between New York City and Washington, D.C., she developed her sensibility within environments shaped by cultural density and historical awareness, influences that later surfaced through her commitment to process-driven abstraction. Her education at the Kansas City Art Institute and the New York Studio School grounded her in rigorous visual inquiry, while her MFA studies at Boston University under Philip Guston strengthened her understanding of how emotional weight can reside within form. These formative experiences established a foundation for a practice that resists quick interpretation, instead rewarding sustained attention and physical proximity.
The significance of Mastrangelo’s work within the contemporary art landscape emerges from her refusal to separate concept from material. Her surfaces are constructed rather than illustrated, relying on accumulated actions that register time, repetition, and bodily presence. Line in her work does not function as a purely optical device but as a physical entity that asserts itself through thickness, resistance, and weight. This approach positions her work between painting, sculpture, and textile without collapsing into any single category, allowing her to engage multiple art histories while maintaining a distinctly personal voice.
Recognition of this contribution is reflected in her extensive exhibition history and critical reception. Mastrangelo has shown her work both nationally and internationally, with museum exhibitions at the Islip Art Museum in New York and the City Museum of Neuötting in Germany. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum by Barry Schwabsky, featured in The Woven Tale Press, and profiled in Suboart Magazine. These engagements underscore the seriousness with which her practice is regarded, while also situating her within broader conversations about abstraction, materiality, and embodied making.
Susan Mastrangelo: Education, Influence, and Artistic Lineage
Mastrangelo’s artistic lineage is inseparable from her formal training and the mentors who shaped her approach to seeing and making. Studying under Philip Guston at Boston University proved particularly consequential, not in terms of stylistic imitation but through an inherited permission to value intuition, vulnerability, and process as legitimate artistic drivers. Guston’s example offered a model of how personal history and emotional states could inform abstraction without becoming illustrative. Mastrangelo absorbed this lesson and translated it into a language rooted in construction and touch rather than figuration.
Her development was further enriched through participation in prestigious residencies and visiting artist programs that offered sustained time for experimentation and reflection. Experiences at the American Academy in Rome, Civitella Ranieri, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, the Triangle Workshop under Anthony Caro, and the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland exposed her to diverse artistic communities and critical dialogues. Each setting contributed to a deepened awareness of how context, architecture, and daily rhythm could influence the evolution of a body of work.
Awards and grants have played a crucial role in supporting the continuity of her practice. Mastrangelo is the recipient of a Mercedes Matter Award, a Visiting Artist Rockwell Grant, and two Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants. These honors reflect sustained institutional confidence in her vision and underscore the seriousness of her contribution to contemporary abstraction. Together, education, mentorship, and professional recognition form a cohesive framework that supports the independence and resilience evident in her work today.
Material, Process, and the Emotional Logic of Form
At the core of Mastrangelo’s practice lies an intimate relationship with materials that carry personal and symbolic weight. The act of knitting, taught to her by her grandmother, remains central to her process and emotional vocabulary. This repetitive gesture provides comfort and establishes a rhythm that mirrors the body’s internal tempo, transforming making into a form of quiet synchronization. Knitting becomes a metaphorical healing process, where each stitch contributes to a protective structure that suggests care, endurance, and continuity.
Using upholstery cord, recycled fabric, paint, and knitted elements, Mastrangelo constructs what she describes as an anatomical choreography across wood panels. Shapes emerge within shapes, forming architectural configurations rooted in the human form without depicting it directly. These elements bind and connect, becoming integral components of layered surfaces that balance density with openness. The resulting compositions convey solace and hope through their very construction, asserting that cohesion can emerge from accumulated, intuitive actions.
Her working method resists rigid planning. Each piece begins with a general sense of color and material, yet composition and placement remain unresolved until the process unfolds. This intuitive approach allows the work to evolve organically, guided by internal rhythm rather than predetermined outcome. Color plays a vital emotional role, with vivid hues such as pinks, reds, oranges, and turquoises interacting with whites and blacks to heighten contrast and tenderness. Painted passages beneath raised elements create a dialogue between flatness and relief, reinforcing the tension between concealment and exposure.
Susan Mastrangelo: Teaching, Continuity, and Present Practice
Alongside her studio work, Mastrangelo has maintained a long and influential commitment to teaching, shaping generations of students through sustained engagement with artistic inquiry. She taught at Fisher College in Boston from 1977 to 1980, and later taught and chaired the art department at the Buckley School in New York City from 1991 to 2017. These roles allowed her to articulate her values around process, discipline, and intuition, reinforcing her belief in art as a lived practice rather than a purely academic pursuit.
Her practice has also been extensively documented in three books that trace the evolution of her work across decades. Heads in Limbo, published in 2013, Safe at Home from 2021, and Between the Line and the Curve released in 2024 collectively provide insight into her sustained exploration of form, material, and emotional resonance. These publications serve not as retrospectives in the conventional sense but as markers of continuity, demonstrating how her visual language has expanded while remaining anchored in core principles.
Currently working full time as an artist at the Can Factory in Gowanus, Mastrangelo continues to build upon this legacy with renewed focus and momentum. Over the past two years, she has presented three solo exhibitions in New York City and Brooklyn, affirming the ongoing relevance of her work within a rapidly shifting cultural landscape. Her practice today embodies both assertiveness and compassion, offering abstraction not as an intellectual puzzle but as an environment shaped by resilience, touch, and quiet hope.
