The end of October finds us refocusing our project and prioritizing foremost images of Suzanne’s that document the art history of our city. This may seems like a no-brainer, prostate but there are a number of series or bodies of work in her archive beyond her documentary portraiture of artists and art patrons in Houston, most of which have never been seen by a public audience.\n\nI think it’s important to highlight about Suzanne Paul that she wasn’t simply a documentarian. She was an artist in the true sense of the world – obsessed with her craft and immersed in the creative potential of her everyday experiences.\n\nWe don’t just want to organize her archive to create a resource of documentary images – we want to expand upon the career of the artist and continue to offer her work to the public through exhibitions and multi-media presentations of her work. Thus, as I scan images from the photographer, I’m also piecing together her history as an artist, which includes reading about the exhibitions she was included in and archiving exhibition related documents.\n\nI shared a little bit of this info in the panel discussion I recapped in my last post, but I’d like to take a more in-depth look at Suzanne’s early career not only as a picture-taker, but as an exhibiting artist, though the two certainly do go hand-in-hand.\n\nThe beginning of this overlap between an artist’s career and that of a professional photographer is rooted in her relationship with the CAMH and with Jim Harithas that auspiciously begun in 1976. As I’ve written about before, Jim offered her a solo show but also commissioned her to photograph artists and exhibitions presented by the CAMH. The images from that period of her life and career I do hope we recover in this Focus project, but perhaps that’s for another post.\n\nWhat is interesting is that we can see the results of the unique synergy around her CAMH life and that she continued to photograph, as she had as a child, the parts of her life with which she was most familiar. Thus, we have this body of artist portraits we’re focusing on at the moment. Much lesser known, however, are the exhibitions in which she participated in at the CAMH, as an artist, and some of here later inclusions in exhibitions and publications, locally and nationwide. In this post I’ll highlight select exhibitions in Suzanne’s early career.\n\n\n\nI’ve shown a shot of Suzanne’s 1976 solo exhibition in the basement of the CAMH in an earlier post. The exhibition, Suzanne Paul: Photographs, was scheduled for May 21 – June 15, 1976, during which the museum flooded. This was in fact the first solo presentation by a female photographer at the museum – a standout moment for Suzanne and more broadly for female photographers at large.\n\nIn 1979 Suzanne was included in a group exhibition at the CAMH, FIRE!, which was curated by Texas great James Surls, friend, contemporary, and photographic subject of Suzanne’s. FIRE ambitiously collected and presented the work of 100 Texas artists. The catalogue for this exhibition is a huge resource to me – not only does it detail the context of Suzanne’s career, but it gives me a 99 names of artists Suzanne did or may have photographed and deepens this investigation.\n\n\n\nFIRE! catalogue cover and excerpt, hosted by the CAMH, February 16 – April 15, 1979\n\nAs I dig into the paper documents left in Suzanne’s archive collection, I get an increasingly strong sense of the headway she made for women artists. Another significant exhibition in which Suzanne was included in was the touring presentation by Women and Their Work, Women In Sight: New Art in Texas – the first statewide juried exhibition of women artists ever held in Texas, juried by Marcia Tucker, then Director of The New Museum of New York.\n\n\n\n

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\n\n\n\n\nAfter these early presentations of Suzanne’s photography, there are two decades of artistic activity to research and piece together. I hope to detail in coming posts more of the exhibitions in which Suzanne was a featured artist. There really is no telling what we’ll uncover and no limit to the connections we can make among artists in Houston, in Texas, and in America. What we know for sure is that we’ve opened an exciting can of worms and that we’re making connections that encourage us in our pursuit of learning and sharing our city’s collective artistic history.\n\n \n

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\nContent originally published by Theresa Escobedo, here, on 10.28.16