"Those Spaces Between Us" Online Exhibition Catalog, 2021
Torpedo Factory, Alexandria VA
curated by Nikki Brugnoli
"SUPERSATURATION, Susanna Starr" Exhibition Catalog, 2002
Museum of Contemporary Art, Fort Collins, CO.
essay by Nancy Princenthal
"ABSORBED Susanna Starr", Exhibition Catalog, 2000
Cynthia Broan Gallery, NYC
essay by Douglas Maxwell
"Beyond The Pale" Exhibition Catalog, 2002
Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY
Curated and Essay by Dede Young
"Auga Doce/Fresh Water" Exhibition Catalog, 2014
Fundcion Cidade de Cultura de Galicia, page 188
Benton, Camille, "KYIV Art Collection of the US Agency for International Development"
Art In Embassies, US Department of State, 2013, pages 52,53
"I have a secret wish", exhibition catalog, 2012
Visual Arts Gallery, Univ. of Alabama, Birmingham, AL
Curated and essay by John Fields
Benton, Camille, "KYIV UKRAINE", Art Collection of the United States Embassy,
Art In Embassies Program, US Department of State, pages 44-45
"Rags To Riches 25 Years of Paper Art From Dieu Donne Papermill", 2001
Exhibition Catalog, page 27
"Corporal Identity Body Language" Exhibition Catalog, 2003
Museum of Arts and Design, NYC
pages 27, 290, 291
"DECADE Contemporary Collecting 2002-2012"
The Albright-Knox gallery, Buffalo, NY
organized by Douglas Dreishpoon, Louis Grachos and Heather Pesanti
The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, 2012
pages 309 and 396
"New York's Underground Art Museum/MTA Arts & Design"
by Sandra Bloodworth and William Ayres,
The Monacelli Press, 2014, page 251
"Textility", Exhibition Catalog, 2012
Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ
curated and essay by Mary Birmingham & Joanne Mattera
Everett, Deborah, "Trajectories", NY Arts, Nov. 2000, Vol 5, No. 11
Dieu Donne "Pulp" Newsletter, Sept-Dec 2000, No.31
Feaster, Felicia, "Trippy Colors Create Special Effects in Susanna Starr's Sculptures"
Atlantic Journal Constitution, Arts & Theater Section, Monday December 7, 2015
Freedman, Matt, "Susanna Starr at Cynthia Broan Gallery",
Review Magazine, February 1, 2000,
Volume 5, Number 9
Gottlieb, Stacey, "Susanna Starr"
NYFA Current Magazine, May 2011
King, Howard," Gallery: Unseen opening at Collar Works", The Collaborative, Oct 28, 2019
Katz, Carissa, "At The Barn With Albee's Colonists"
East Hampton Star, Arts & Living, July 31, 2003
Lambert, Audra,"Illuminating the "Unseen": Collar Works in Troy, NY Elevates Contemporary Artist", Up The Ante, November 8, 2019
Long, Robert, "Susanna Starr Reading In Color", Solo Exhibition, Avram Gallery, LIU, Southampton, NY, East Hampton Star, Arts & Living, Sept 18, 2003
New York Times, Metropolitan Section, Calendar/New Jersey
Sunday October 23, 2011, page 14
Princenthal, Nancy, "Susanna Starr at Cynthia Broan", Art In America, June 2000, page 121
Schmerler, Sarah, "Tunneling" Famous Accounts, Art In America, November 2010, page 182
Terrell, Matthew, "Art Review: Susanna Starr's Psychedelic Doilies at Marcia Wood", Burnaway, December 15, 2015
Vartanian, Hrag, "Tunneling Through Famous Accountants", Hyperallergic, Sept 3, 2010
Weld, "Punk Rock Art", Arts Section, August 30-Sept 6, 2012 / page 17
Birmingham, Alabama
Romanov Grave Interview: One Question/One Answer, May 31, 2022
New York Times, Home and Garden Section, Thursday August 2, 2012
Monday November 21, 2011 Featured Artist on "PEEK", a blog
curated by the artist Lee Gainer that has featured a new
contemporary artist every weekday since February 2008.
Susanna Starr: Soaking It In
Absorption is a condition that all art courts, and seldom mere successfully than Susanna Starr's; in her current work, soaking it in serves as process, as image, and for the viewer - whose behavior is thus modeled with a serio-comic intelligence distinctive to Starr - as outcome. This is so because her current sculptures are made of big commercial sponges, some of them big pliable sheets, others dense rectangular blocks. All are inundated with acrylic paint to the point of saturation, and beyond. By carefully controlling successive pours, with one color chasing another in timed intervals, Starr causes shifting hues to spill down the work's sides, or swirl in puddles at its base.
Made of two strips of thin, pliant sponge doubled over each other like a giant lanyard, Folding Over, sinks from innocent white at the top to deep scarlet at the bottom; the effect is of an incrementally protracted, almost absurdly sensual blush. On the other hand, the ashen-faced Far Side of The Moon huddles in a corner, its pitted and pocked surface a stepped series of lunar grays. Some sculptures are downright saucy, as with Sop, the four pert, lozenge-shaped sponges of which swim merrily in a fiery yellow-red pool of paint, like kiddie floats on Mars. The sexiness gets more explicit (or, more adult) in the corseted Buoy, made of a dense and tight-grained (hence smooth-sided) three-foot-high rectangular sponge that has ben cored, submitted to a tie-dye-like cascade of blue and purple, and then laced up tight as a well-filled bustier. A similar tone is struck by the lipstick-red, mattress-shaped Tenderloin, which slouches against a wall. Dimpled with foam-covered buttons, Tenderloin has been gutted and filled with paint, which causes it to bulge slightly; at the top, the paint laps the rim of a slitted opening. By contrast, Green Gorge is a gray-green, block-shaped sculpture of unimpeachable of geometric rectitude. The straight-edged cuts at the top and side, into and out of which pour acid-green and yellow paint of flesh-eating intensity, make this sculpture seem the love child of Minimalism at its most righteous and Pop at its bawdiest - a cross, say, between Donald Judd and Claes Oldenburg, with Lynda Benglis as godmother.
The Historical awareness implicit in Starr's work ranges further, tending especially toward moments of emphasis on the relationship between paint and support surface. If color field painting, for instance, is abstraction's superego, in which all trace of life evaporates into an ethereal, nearly immaterial plane - a thought cloud of color - Starr's current work is painting's id, where the sexy, juicy flesh of paint prevails. But the sponge sculptures are not simply late expressionism's animal nature stripped bare. While heeding Frank Stella's famous advice to "keep the paint as good as it was in the can", Starr also engages such redirections of abstract painterliness as Roy Lichtenstein's pseudo-ben-day-dot portraits of individual brushstrokes, and Scott Richter's table-top landscapes in solid paint. Nor does Starr scant her medium's more idiosyncratic metaphorical implications. Soaking it up like a sponge is what curious children do, or good ones; suck it up is advice to the emotionally sloppy. At once innocent and knowing, and lush to the point of lewdness, Starr's sculptures do both.
Nancy Princenthal, 2002