SUSAN HOFFMAN FISHMAN

Susan Hoffman Fishman is a mixed-media painter, environmental artist and arts writer who has exhibited widely throughout the United States, including at the William Benton Museum, University of Connecticut (Storrs, CT); New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, CT); Stand4 Gallery, (Brooklyn, NY); Alternative Museum (NYC); Wheaton College (Norton, MA); New York Hall of Science (Bronx, NY); Yale University (New Haven, CT); National Aquarium (Baltimore, Md); Nurture/Nature Center (Easton, PA), and numerous others.

Fishman’s practice focuses on the devastation to the land around bodies of water and the bodies of water themselves that have been severely impacted by climate change and by extraction of water for industrial use and human consumption. These factors have caused drought, desertification and the proliferation of sink holes around the world. She is especially interested in the ironic contrast between the horrifying destruction happening around and in our rivers, lakes and oceans and the magnificent beauty of that destruction.

The materials and processes that Fishman uses include acrylic, oil pigment, satellite images, collage, cyanotype, mono-printing and mixed-media. The surfaces of her paintings are highly textured and offer a physicality that emphasizes the tactile nature of the Earth itself. In the tradition of landscape painters, who for centuries have depicted scenes of specific places, sometimes majestic, sometimes intimate, she is portraying the reality of our contemporary landscapes, which have been dramatically and radically transformed by the climate crisis.

Fishman’s current work is a series of painted scrolls called The Tale of Lost Waters that together form a narrative documenting a global geological disaster and emphasizes the sacredness of the Earth’s vital resources. Like the scrolls created thousands of years ago as revered stories or records of historical events, The Tale of Lost Waters tells the story of the 53% of our lakes and inland seas that existed for millions of years but are now only a fraction of their original size. Highly textured and saturated with rich colors like the deserts, mountains and forests they portray, the images evoke the grandeur, history and devastation of the Earth’s waters.

Articles, interviews and reviews of Fishman’s work have appeared in Burning Worlds: Climate Change in Art & Literature, a publication of the Chicago Review of Books; The Washington Post, Art Spiel, Sci/Art Magazine, The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, The Hartford Courant, Artists and Climate Change and numerous others.

Fishman has been awarded a number of grants and awards from The Connecticut Office of the Arts, the Awesome Foundation CT, the City of Stamford, CT, Crit Lab and LaViola Gallery (NYC). She has attended many artist residencies, including at Planet Labs, a satellite imaging company (San Francisco, CA); Governor’s Island (NYC); Five Points Center of the Arts(Torrington, CT; and The Swimming Hole Foundation, (Bearsville, NY).

In addition to her art practice, Fishman writes regularly on topics related to the climate crisis. From 2017 - 2022, she wrote a monthly column called “Imagining Water,” for the international blog, Artists and Climate Change, which highlighted artists of all disciplines around the world who are working on global water issues and climate change, and is a contributor to Art Spiel, an on-line publication that addresses the work of contemporary artists. Her most recent article (March, 2024) appears in Image Journal.