Susan Lynne Berger:
Mixed Media/Fiber Artist

Susan L. Berger began as a painter. She is an original tenant of Westbeth, having moved here in March 1970 as a sculptor. After learning rug hooking and weave stitching techniques, she expanded her vision for her art. Her various works include design tapestries and extensive mixed media projects that explore the famous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 in lower Manhattan, the demise of New York City’s Superior Inks factory in the West Village, her family scrapbook series, and a revisit of her high school yearbook. More recently she created projects in response to the tolls of the Covid-19 pandemic. Berger’s work has been shown in many exhibitions and is in the Feminist Art Base of the Brooklyn Museum as well as White Columns Curated Artist Registry. She has had a number of artist residencies, including the Joan Mitchell Center and Byrdcliffe Art Colony. And she has received grants from the Puffin Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Berger earned a graduate degree in library science from Columbia University.

Terry Stoller spoke with Susan L. Berger in February 2022 about her interest in labor studies and her entry into artwork with fiber; her mixed media projects; her design tapestries; her high school and family history projects, including a painting contest; her artistic response to the pandemic; and her remembrances of the late artist Jack Dowling.

Terry Stoller: Your bio says that you started as a painter and then learned rug hooking techniques in graduate school.

Susan L. Berger: I did sculpture also, so it was painting and sculpture, a more classic connotation of artwork. When I was in graduate school, it was unrelated to the arts. I was actually in the field of labor relations and labor economics. I just happened to come upon a group of women doing this kind of thing, using rug hooking and macramé work, and I became interested in it. That’s how it started.

Why did you go to graduate school in the field of labor rather than continue your art?

I wanted to do an academic field. I wanted to move in that direction. I was working in the New York State Department of Labor, and I became interested and decided I wanted to pursue that.

The result was quite wonderful because you combined the two interests in major projects, which we will get to. But first, was working in mixed media owing to your interest in storytelling?

To work in that vein—I didn’t want to stay in the traditional. I liked the multidimensional aspect of pursuing a mixed media field. It was almost like creating my own stage designs in my head for my work.

One of the many exhibits you were in was a folk art exhibit. Do you consider yourself a folk artist?

I’m not a folk artist in a traditional sense, but I think some of my pieces lend themselves to that appearance. So in some ways it is folk art—or outsider art, which falls into its own category.

You’re also in the Feminist Art Base at the Brooklyn Museum. Along with your other political leanings, do you see yourself as a feminist artist?

Not 100 percent. I consider the things I choose to do to be more of a humanist kind of art. I’m not strictly feminist, even though I looked to women who did samplers. That intrigued me because they were telling stories about their time and what they did, letting you know about their life. That interested me, and I explored that vein.

You had a background in the field of labor. One of your major pieces is about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Would you talk about the genesis of that project? 

Labor history has always interested me. Part of my graduate studies was in labor history: the strikes, mediation, negotiation. I had an internship once with the UAW [United Auto Workers]. Exploring the rights of workers is a very important issue. How the shirtwaist factory project started was that someone mentioned me to someone else, and that person came to me saying they were doing a quilt. And they needed a piece for the quilt on the shirtwaist factory. Would I be willing to do it? And I said yes. The piece that I did was very heavy; it didn’t really work in with the quilt, and they gave it back to me. And I forgot about it.

Then in 2012, Superstorm Sandy flooded the studios in the basement. That piece was in my studio, and it got drenched with water. I decided to look back at it and try to do something with it because it hadn’t been destroyed. It just needed to be dried out. And I decided to pursue the shirtwaist factory, first starting with a drawing. The drawing had a middle piece, which was the swatch that didn’t work out. I decided to portray what it was like working in the shirtwaist factory—what it looked like in the factory itself, with the rows and rows where the young women worked and toiled for many hours. The other two sides of the drawing piece had the strike that was mounted two years before the 1911 fire. In 1909, there was a shirtwaist factory strike about the working conditions. So the first part was the beginning of what the piece was going to become.

20,000 Strong to the Inferno of 1911 — Drawing. 2013. Fiber/mixed media, 30.5 inches (w) x 40.5 inches (h).

I got a grant from the Puffin Foundation and went on to create the installation: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and How It Changed Everything? 20,000 Women Who Marched Before. And I created three panels. The three panels and the middle section have to do with the factory. The workers were trying to get out to escape, but the fire ladder did not go as high as the ninth and tenth floors—so what were they going to do to get out? The doors were locked, and they couldn’t get out that way. Some jumped from the broken windows, and they died from the fall. I have the broken ladders from the fall and a piece about where they worked, and the general layout of the factory.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (middle piece, detail). 2015. Fiber/mixed media, 120 inches (w) x 60 inches (h).

The other part of it, which has five pieces in six sections, three on each side, had to do with people who were active in the labor movement and other figures like Frances Perkins, who later became Secretary of Labor. The extreme end of it are mostly women—146 people died, and 123 were women. They were immigrant women, from Eastern Europe and from Italian heritage. I included a list of names, their ages, and where they lived. The blackness from the smoke represents that everything turned black and became ashes. It was difficult to find out who these people were because the only way they could identify them—they were charred remains—was through jewelry. Or, if they didn’t report back home, the feeling was they had died. It took over a year to complete that whole installation.

How do you determine what you’re going to leave as painting or drawing and what you want to express with the fiber? How do you come to that balance?

It becomes integrated. I do sketches, and in this particular piece, the textile was a re-creation of the shirtwaist itself, what it looked like. And then you have the writings throughout the work. The “Bintel Brief” was an advice column in the Forward, a Yiddish newspaper. People would write in, and editors would respond with comments. I was creating these whole episodes. It is like a story, but it’s really oral history.

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and How It Changed Everything? 20,000 Women Who Marched Before (full installation). 2016. Fiber/mixed media, 25 feet 8 inches (w) x 60 inches (h).

When you started as a painter, did you envision that you would be creating these type of pieces?

No, it just evolved. I started out in fiber with simple, geometric kind of designs, some of them influenced by Native American art, and created pieces that take on the Native American culture, which deals with the environment.

Later on, the work became more storytelling. When I was working on the Superior Ink stories, that was like creating stage designs.

Something Superior Is Coming? Is It?? 2010. Fiber/mixed media, 36 inches (w) x 55 inches (h).

Can you explain your fascination with Superior’s factory and why you wanted to record the destruction of it through your work?

My apartment faced Superior Ink. I would watch these people going back and forth. The loading dock was very visible to me, and that three-story structure was visible. I would see the room where the employees would take their break or eat lunch. I would see the workers and the activity on the loading dock. So the building was very alive in my mind. It was a building where there was a great deal of life happening in there. This became important to me. I wanted to know about it. I wanted to express about the building. I started doing research on it. It was done by a famous industrial designer. I took photographs of the decline. I even took bricks when they demolished it.

The building was just torn down. It was out of the landmark district. I was interested in what was going to replace the building and the loss of what that part of New York represented in terms of people working and the artists who moved into the area. We weren’t responsible for this, but it became like, if artists moved in, then the area began thinking about gentrification and redefinition and redevelopment of these buildings.

Superior Ink Loading Dock: Three Panels. 2012. Fiber/mixed media/varied rug hooking techniques, 120 inches (w) x 60 inches (h).

Much of your work got destroyed in Superstorm Sandy, but you were able to reconstruct some of it. I think you restored the Superior Ink Loading Dock piece.

A lot of the pieces were compromised, except the pieces that I wrapped with bubble wrap and that were tightly fastened so the moisture wouldn’t get inside. The tapestries were a different story because I had to go through a great deal to make sure that they were kept whole. One piece fell apart, but I kept all the pieces to eventually do something with that. At some point, I moved to Poughkeepsie so that I could restore the work. There was no place here to restore it.

Can you describe what was ruined and how you restored it?

The Superior Ink was one part, and the tapestries were the other part. The frames of the Superior Ink were totally destroyed. Anything that was framed was badly damaged. Things that were under glass had to be dried out, redrawn, and refigured. This meant redoing the piece and being a restorer of work. I started reading about how to restore artwork. And since I did have a library background and had gone to Columbia, I contacted people to help me and guide me on how to do this. The tapestries were a horrendous task. All of them had to be taken up. One was very heavy. When they’re in water, they become heavier. About four or five people had to take up this piece. It was dried out in the Westbeth courtyard. And every day I would dry all the tapestries and use alcohol to spray them so that the works would remain fungus-free. This went on for about a month. I would take them out; then wrap them up; then take them out and wrap them up. I wanted to make sure that the tapestries remained whole as best as possible.

Overall, it was a tedious task. And you had to have them washed. I had to find someone to do that, but they had to be totally dry first; otherwise they would have come apart. And the colors also changed because so much water got in there. The colors had to be restored. That’s when I went to Columbia to the preservation program, and I spoke to some people there about how to preserve the tapestries.

Did you have to redye them?

I put special fabric dyes on some of them. On some others, I left smudges and worked around the smudges to incorporate into another work in a similar scope.

Were these the design tapestries?

Yes, the designs; the other pieces came later. And I’m talking about the Superior Ink pieces. Some of the pieces were rusted, but I sort of liked the rust, and I kept it. That enhanced one of the pieces. But it was a long process, and I was up in a little loft in Poughkeepsie on the third floor—there was no elevator, so I was going up and down. It was hard. A few months later, I broke my shoulder in three places. (And I was in two shows at that time.) It took about a year to get full motion back in that arm.

My Pages/Whole Pages for Yearbook: Boys on One Side, and Girls on the Other Side. 2017. Fiber/mixed media/weave stitching, 60 inches (w) x 20 inches (h).

Since then, you’ve done a couple of projects about your past—one about your high school years.

I was looking at my 1962 high school yearbook. I was interested in the people who weren’t most recognized or who weren’t overachievers. I wanted to know more about them. First, I started with my page. I decided to rewrite it to what I was really going to say about myself at that time, using the original contents in the yearbook and then going back to what was really in my mind after looking back over time.

Cruise Ship Family Voyage, 1952 or 1956 — Drawing. 2013. Fiber/mixed media, 40 inches (w) x 36 inches (h).

And there was a memoir series about a family trip.

I think my brother had a lot of photographs, and he shared them with me. I decided I would do something with them in looking back. I did a large tapestry called Bon Voyage. I did the drawing first, and included snapshots, and some of it was weave stitching. I wrote different things on that work. And that inspired me to take that tapestry and use it in the Bon Voyage series about a cruise ship trip: Cruise Ship Family Voyage, 1952 or 1956? —  Four Panels. That work was shown in a large exhibition. There’s another small installation with the sisters on a cruise ship. These are snapshots, and that was done in five panels.

Sisters on a Cruise Ship with Snapshots — Five Panels. 2019. Fiber/mixed media/rug hooking, 48 inches (w) x 48 inches (h).

I love the 1960s painting of your grandparents posing in a Lower East Side tenement. I thought that might have been related to your interest in labor.

My grandparents owned a bakery. None of my relatives were ever involved in labor, in terms of working in factories or anything like that. If you look closely, there’s a Bénédictine bottle in the painting. There was a contest that you could enter if you put a Bénédictine bottle in a setting. I entered the contest. That’s an example of where the family photographs came in. I said, I think a Bénédictine bottle would look interesting in this one particular setting, on the other side of these grandparents. I’m sure they never would drink Bénédictine. The painting was somewhat stylized, and there was humor to it with these Jewish immigrants from Austria. I think it got an honorable mention. They liked the painting, but they didn’t understand how it could be used for their purposes.

Grandparents in Miniature Pose in LES (Lower East Side). 1960s. Acrylic painting, 32 inches (w) x 38 inches (h).

You did a piece about the UAW and the dignity of work.

First I did a drawing. I saw a few photographs in the New York Times. Most of the picketers were women. It was very cold, it was winter, and they were picketing in Michigan. From there I went on to another piece called Dignity of Work: UAW on Strike. That was in 2020. Again, I created almost a stage setting, but using the UAW for the strike and making it feel very cold. On two sides of the picture are little bricks, and I put a screen over the entire work and created a wired fence. That’s all done in weave stitching technique, and there are words expressed by the strikers and also of another UAW strike that happened many years before.

Dignity of Work: UAW on Strike. 2020. Fiber/mixed media, 36 inches (w) x 36 inches (h).

What are you working on now?

The Covid-19 series, which I did during the pandemic. In the first series [2020], there are 13 panels. That was on exhibit. There are panels of people who died who are icons to me, like Little Richard. His music represented my youth. And there other non-Covid people who died. And there are six panels that had to do with what happened at the time. Everything became desolate. And the bottom three panels have to do with people who died from Covid. John Prine was one of them. These individual canvases had photographs and articles that appeared in the New York Times. I readapted the photographs with special pencils and markers to make them more three-dimensional. There was weave stitching within the works.

Series II has to do with people who died from the building, and others like Bill Withers. There are sections that are more political—about what was happening with the Amazon and with Native Americans on the reservations. And the very bottom has to do with people who died of Covid. Two of them were Native Americans with tragic stories. One was a 22-year-old woman with two very young children. She dreamed of becoming a leader of her tribe. Another part is a panel of women who died from Covid. The pieces about women who died from Covid-19 were done in a quilt-like art design. The panels are placed on a 40 in. by 48 in. canvas. I wanted the viewer to feel that they were looking at a quilt.

Covid-19 Series 2 — 13 Panels. 2020. Fiber/mixed media. Overall dimension: 50 inches (w) x 70 inches (h).

How has Westbeth contributed to your work as an artist?

Westbeth has given me some kind of grounding. I was grounded by living here and the stability that offered, meeting other people here and seeing people in exhibitions. That’s helped me a lot. And having the gallery here. Jack Dowling was such an important figure to me. He was just wonderful. He was very inspirational for me. And no one since then has been able to replace him. He was one of a kind. The years that I knew him helped me a great deal in deciding to do these works and to face the challenges of doing them.

To see more images of Susan L. Berger’s works, go to www.susanlberger.com

All images courtesy of Susan L. Berger.

Terry Stoller is a Westbeth resident and author of Tales of the Tricycle Theatre.

Profiles in Art, Copyright 2022 Terry Stoller and Westbeth Artists Residents Council