Sue Ferguson Gussow Retrospective at The Cooper Union

Sue Ferguson Gussow, professor emerita at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, is a figurative artist working in a wide range of drawing and painting media. For more than 50 years, she has been instrumental in training Cooper Union architecture students, via freehand drawing, to think spatially through communication between their eyes, minds, and hands. In that time, she has also amassed a trove of her own work — intimate portraits of people in her life, from immediate family, including her late husband, to fellow Cooper Union faculty and alumni. Now, the School of Architecture at The Cooper Union presents a retrospective of her lifetime body of work in the college’s Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery from October 12 through November 17.

The exhibition, “Sue Ferguson Gussow: Retrospective” features 39 oil paintings as well as 47 charcoal and pastel drawings by the 88-year-old artist who remains active to this day producing new works in her Amagansett studio.

The paintings and drawings in the show stretch back to her student days and are as recent as this summer, when she produced a charcoal portrait of Hayley Eber, acting dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, and a painting of Anik Person and Elizabeth Graziolo, both 1995 graduates of the School of Architecture.

“Drawing is both compulsion and connection,” explains Gussow of her practice and why the figure has played a central role in her work since she was a child. “There is intimacy in capturing the essence of a person. I prefer to work from people I know. These portraits have become a way of keeping family, including my extended Cooper family, with me. These images fill my studio and my home. Their memories stay with me and keep me company long after a work is completed.”

Gussow, who studied at Cooper from 1953 through 1956, bucked the trend by focusing on the human figure at a time when abstract expression was ascendant. Such work did not compel her, even as her all-male instructors encouraged it. The figure has been a principal area of focus throughout her career, and the show’s earliest painting, a self-portrait painted as a student in 1955, reflects that compelling focus. Alongside portraits, the exhibition also includes works shaped by the narratives of women’s lives. This includes a series of dresses, among them the dance gown worn by Balanchine principal dancer Karin von Aroldingen, that hold an imprint of the body and its implicit gestures and movements, as well as a series of seated pregnant women. There are also flower and doll studies, objects that are historically categorized as feminine.

“Sue Ferguson Gussow: Retrospective” is the second retrospective The Cooper Union has mounted of Gussow’s work. The first was held in 1997, nearly 20 years after she developed the freehand drawing program in the School of Architecture that she taught for decades and that has influenced educators at other schools, nationally and globally.

A second, updated edition of her book “Architects Draw” will be published by Architectural Publisher B/ Gilbert Hansen to celebrate the close of the retrospective.

The exhibition opens Thursday, October 12, with a reception at 6:30 p.m. at The Cooper Union Foundation Building, Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery, 2nd Floor, 7 East 7th Street, New York City. The show is free and open to the public. For more information, visit cooper.edu/architecture.