Susanneh Bieber

Susanneh Bieber is associate professor at Texas A&M University, where she teaches courses in modern and contemporary art and architectural history. She received her PhD from the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2020, she was the recipient of the Scholarship of Design Article Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, and in 2017 she was awarded the International Essay Prize by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Her monograph American Artists Engage the Built Environment, 1960-1979 was published with Routledge in 2023. Her articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Art Journal, American Art, Journal of Architectural Education, the Getty Research Journal, and Panorama. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2012/13 and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in 2015. Previously, she worked as a curator at the Tate Modern in London and the Fresno Metropolitan Museum in California.

Susanneh Bieber’s area of expertise is modern and contemporary American art and architecture in a transnational context. She is particularly interested in the interactions between visual art, architecture, and ecology, addressing gender, race, and social justice issues. In her single-authored monograph American Artists Engage the Built Environment, 1960-1979 (Routledge 2023), she reframes the development of avant-garde art from minimal and pop art to land art, conceptual art, site-specific practices, and feminist art in the context of architectural discourses. The book shows that major avant-garde artists, including Donald Judd, Robert Grosvenor, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Mary Miss, were attracted to architectural practices because they directly shaped the social and material spaces of everyday life. Bieber is also an expert on feminist artist Judy Chicago, examining her early, proto-feminist work in the context of male-dominated disciplines such as architecture and engineering. Her next book project explores inflatables in art and architecture focusing on the mid-twentieth century when new pneumatic technologies and tensile materials were available to practitioners in various locations across the globe.