Suzi Gablik

Gablik was born to Anthony J. Gablik and Geraldine Schwarz Gablik in New York, New York in 1934.[4] In 1951, after a summer studying at Black Mountain College, she entered Hunter College where she studied with Robert Motherwell and received her BA in 1955.[5]

As a graduation gift from her parents, she traveled to Europe, but on her return she fell out from her parents over a love affair and was forced onto her own resources. Dollie Chareau, the widow of Pierre Chareau, let her stay in Chareau's studio, and she began working for George Wittenborn, a dealer in art books and small-press publisher as a clerk at Wittenborn's bookstore and assistant with his publishing. This was the beginning of her work in art publishing and art history.[6]

Gablik has written articles for Art in America (for which she was the London correspondent for fifteen years),[7] ARTnews (1962-1966),[7] Times Literary Supplement,[8][9] and The New Criterion,[10] as well as for blogs.[11]

Gablik's first book was Pop Art Redefined, co-authored with art critic John Russell.[7][12] Her other books include: Progress in Art (1977),[13] Has Modernism Failed? (1982),[14] The Reenchantment of Art (1992),[15] Conversations Before the End of Time (1995),[16] Living the Magical Life: An Oracular Adventure (2002),[17] and Magritte (1970),[18] about the Belgian surrealist René Magritte, written while living with the Magrittes.[19]

Gablik's The Reenchantment of Art announced her disenchantment with “the compulsive and oppressive consumeristic framework in which we do our work,” and argued that a re-connection to the primordial and to ritual might allow “for a return of soul.”[20][21] Instead of traditional forms of religion, however, Gablik sought out contemporary art that she believed broke out of the Western framework, championing the work of artists such as Frank Gohlke, Gilah Yelin Hirsch, Nancy Holt, Dominique Mazeaud, Fern Shaffer and Otello Anderson, Starhawk, James Turrell and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, in the book and in subsequent critical writing.[22]

In addition to her critical articles, Gablik has conducted interviews with other artists, art critics or philosophers, such as Richard Shusterman.[23][24] She has also written essays for exhibition catalogues of shows that she has curated.[25]

Her papers are held at the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art.[7][6]

Gablik taught at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts and Washington and Lee University, and has lectured at many others. Between 1976–1979, she participated in US International Communications Agency lecture tours in India, Hungary, Pakistan, and countries of South Asia.[26] She also gave a presentation at the Fall 1986 Mountain Lake Symposium on "Postmodernism and the Question of Meaning: For a New Spiritualism."[27]

Gablik's art work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum[28] and the Black Mountain College Museum collection.[29]

Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.[30]

In 2003, Gablik was awarded a National Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding achievement in the visual arts by the Women's Caucus for Art.[31]