Susan Josephson uncovers ‘Bliss’ in career-spanning exhibition

Susan Josephson has been drawing for as long as she can recall, tracing her initial artistic leaning to having been raised by parents who required her to speak German at home. “And that caused me to focus on the visual,” said Susan, who was born in Germany but grew up in Columbus. 

From these earliest days, Susan said she embraced art as a way to process her experiences, the fruits of which will be on display until the end of the week at the Church of the Sparkling Unicorn, where she joined her husband, John Josephson, for an interview earlier this week. One chalk pastel portrait, for example, is titled “Hunger” and emerged when she was 14 or 15 years old and her parents traveled overseas, leaving the artist to be looked after by her older brother, who took the money entrusted to him by their parents and used it to fund his own adventure with friends. “And he left me alone in the house with little food,” Susan said, “which caused me to think about hunger.”

Elsewhere, there are a several watercolor studies of the buildings Susan observed in the German town of Fulda, which she frequented in the year she lived at an isolated all-girls boarding school in the Black Forest – punishment, she said, for sneaking out to see a teenage boyfriend disliked by her parents. These are bookended by comparatively abstracted pieces in which the artist explored early motherhood and married life (she and John met as teenagers and have now been married more than 60 years) and more photorealistic portraiture, including one drawing of a Native American man completed at the request of her mother, Felicitas Goodman, a famed linguist and anthropologist whose work helped introduce her daughter to a range of cultures and philosophies that continue to shape the way she moves through the world.

“This [portrait] was done in New Mexico, because my mother wanted an image of one of the Native American men, but they wouldn’t let photographs be taken at the time,” said Susan, who completed the portrait after observing the man from a distance on several occasions. “And then [my mom] showed it to him, and he accepted it and said she could use it.”

In a way, Susan and her mother served as expressive bookends, with Goodman’s linguistic prowess (the elder spoke more than a dozen languages and worked as a translator) matched by her daughter’s wide-ranging visual skills. The work on display at Sparkling Unicorn – an exhibit coordinated by John as an 80th birthday surprise for Susan – ranges from paintings and professional drawings (one table is covered in books written and/or illustrated by the artist) to a room packed with wondrous crocheted pieces, including intricately patterned blankets and eye-catching, three-dimensional wall hangings.

The exhibition is a rarity for Susan, who taught philosophy at CCAD for 39 years but only showed her own work on a handful of occasions, keeping her art largely closeted owing to her belief that she would be taken less seriously as an academic if it became more known. “Art was considered more of a female thing, and I was competing with the males, and so I’d hide it,” she said. “There are a couple of things I had in faculty shows, but basically I kept it to myself. So, it was amazing to see my husband do this, and pull all of this work together.”

The second half of the exhibition is taken over with crocheted that essentially falls into two camps, the first being those utilitarian objects to which Susan initially gravitated, including blankets and custom clothes for her grandkids’ stuffed animals. “It was total utilitarianism, where the idea was you maximized the good for the greatest number,” she said. “Art just sits on a wall. But a blanket, it helps you. You have a relationship with it.”

The artist eventually expanded on this idea after having a dream in which a spirit guide informed her that if she were to create a medicine wheel where the four points were represented by the four elements (earth, water, fire and air), she would come to “understand the elements better” and unlock a greater power, as she explained it. In the months that followed, she began to experiment with three-dimensional crocheted works, taking a simple metal hoop and then building her yarn compositions atop this frame, beginning with “The World Tree,” about the power of earth. 

Subsequent creations centered water, air and fire. And then Susan branched out, crocheting wall hangings rooted in concepts such as rebirth, equality and, in the striking “Bliss,” Rasa theory, which emphasizes that the purpose of art isn’t simply to portray emotions but rather to allow viewers to more deeply connect with them. “It’s kind of like feeling your emotions in their completeness,” said Susan, whose words also neatly summarize the life-spanning work on display in this remarkable exhibit.