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UPCOMING:

Projects of Art Ethnography

with Lydia Nakashima Degarrod

November 6- December 9, 2025,

Project Space, New York University Abu Dhabi

This exhibition brings together works of Lydia Nakashima Degarrod and Susan Ossman, two artist-anthropologists whose practices dissolve and play on boundaries between scholarship and art. Moving fluidly between ethnographic research and visual expression, their projects invite viewers to reflect on migration, memory, identity, and the ways knowledge takes shape across bodies, materials, and stories.

New and Notable

"States of Exception," Exhibition Catalogue, Preface by curator Mika Cho, Text by Cristiana Giordano and Susan Ossman, California State University Los Angeles, March 2025.

Deborah. Kapchan, “Notes on a Scattered Subject in Montmartre: The Self-Portrait of Susan Marie Ossman.” TDR: The Drama Review 69, no. 1 (2025): 21–35. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1054204324000558.

Susan Ossman, "Invitation," Experimental Encounters in Pandemic Times,Visual Ethnography, XIII, No 2 | 2024 dx.doi.org/10.12835/ve2024.2-157

2025 Exhibitions

GATHER WOOD, GATHER WORDS

Rizq Art Initiatve, Abu Dhabi (April 16- 26)

is the fruit of a multi-site collaboration focused on the action of gathering. Prefacing concepts or topics with an attention to movement, the artists sought to bridge divides of manual and intellectual labor, nature and culture. Their works are inspired by the ceaseless work of gathering wood for village cookstoves or bundling rice to bring to market, by the rustle of the desert winds that fertilize the Amazon with Saharan sand. Attention to bindings leads to reflections on how words gathered as law or tradition shape human fortunes and bodies as they do the natural world.

WINDSWEPT, Wonzimmer Gallery, Los Angeles

March 21-April 18

features paintings by international artist Susan Ossman with sculptural, photographic, collage, video, and installation works by artists including Dani Dodge, Angelica Sotiriou, Beth Elliott, Linda Sue Price, Snezana Saraswati Petrovic, Diane Cockerill, Bruce Cockerill, Scott Meskill, Eileen Oda, Jason Jenn, Nancy Kay Turner, David Isakson, and Nancy Voegeli-Curan.

STATES OF EXCEPTION

Susan Ossman

Curated by Mika Cho

Silverman Gallery, California State University Los Angeles

January 21-February 20

Political theorists have encouraged us to think of states of exception as states of the suspension of law, the handiwork of the tyrant, or the tyrannical. In her multifarious aesthetic inquiries, Susan Ossman manifests the acuity of her vision of the tyrannical. She does not, however, rest with the fashionable presumption that all is political. She acquaints us and confronts us with many other states of exception. On the dark side, she treats the existential condition of migrants without homes or succor, the hallucinatory devastation of the deceived lover, the nomadic wandering and wondering of the diseased, suffering, ever-mindful mindful body, threatened with death. On the bright side, she has unveiled in media extending far beyond the pictorial the ecstasy of passions exceptional even as they partake of the everyday: the visceral ecstasy of erotic and auratic passion, the breathtaking glow of a poppy, the scent and texture of the many places she calls home.