Suzanne Klotz (’66 painting)
Painter, sculptor and Fulbright Scholar
The world has been the inspiration for Suzanne Klotz (’66 painting), who has instituted multi-cultural art programs, workshops and exhibitions in Africa, Australia, Israel, Mexico, Palestine, Taiwan, the United States and, most recently Amman, Jordan. In Amman, on a Fulbright Scholar award, she created an art salon and ran a collaborative workshop with Palestinian women and their families who were dispossessed from their homes and were living in refugee camps.
“The Fulbright award provided the opportunity to expand my research pertaining to the status of Palestinian refugees and create a work of art that addresses Palestinian culture and traditional embroidery,” Klotz said. “The purpose of my project was to create an artwork that honors and preserves Palestinian culture and history, while informing viewers about the ongoing plight of Palestinian land ownership and national identity.”
Before traveling to Amman in 2013, Klotz spent a year creating the beaded, painted and embroidered border of an 8-foot-by-5-foot canvas. The border incorporated the names of all of the 246 Palestinian refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan in Arabic calligraphy.
In Amman, she has led a workshop entitled “Seven Women’s House Keys.” working in both traditional and conceptual art-making practices with seven Palestinian women and their family members. Throughout the year, she blogged about her experiences.
On returning home to Mesa, Ariz., she looked forward to working with a filmmaker and producer on a movie about her Amman experience and to pursuing exhibition opportunities for the “Seven Women’s House Keys” canvas and her other work.
Klotz’s appetite for international travel dates to a whirlwind family tour of Europe after she graduated from high school. “We visited every museum and cathedral mentioned in every European tourist guidebook,” she said. “This trip made me realize that there is a big world outside of the United States, and I made the decision to experience as much of it as possible.”
Recalling her years at KCAI (she spent two years here after studying for two years in the School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis), she described them as “the Alan Ginsberg years.”
“I had a very inspiring literature professor, Roy Culver, who helped me correlate the words of the great authors with composition and form in the visual arts. Even now I still use words as the inspiration for my artworks. As a class, we had an assignment to go to a nightclub to hear Ginsberg, followed by a performance by the newly formed Supremes, minus Diana Ross. Ginsberg had picked up his brother from a mental institution prior to arriving at the nightclub. He propped his brother in a chair on the stage, handed him a microphone and said, ‘Say something.’ His brother mumbled ‘Something,’ followed by a five-minute silence before Ginsberg took the microphone and recited his poems.”
KCAI’s proximity to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is “one of the greatest gifts an art student could have,” Klotz said. “My hours spent at the museum, during class and outside of class, made a great impact on my future goals as an artist. I spent many afternoons sitting in front of a painting or sculpture and letting it ‘take me inside it.’”
Klotz recalled one Nelson-related assignment, which was to choose a piece in the museum and write about it from her own perspective, unrelated to the artist’s intent or any known facts about the piece. “These papers dramatically affected my understanding of the power of art to expand one’s vision and perception of the world around us,” she said.
Asked what advice she would offer to high-school students thinking of studying art and design in college, she said, “Without my B.F.A. degree, I couldn’t have acquired the necessary basics to develop my art and ultimately enter graduate school. Without the challenges presented to me as an M.F.A. student (she earned her graduate degree at Texas Tech University in Lubbock), I wouldn’t have known how to find my own expression. My advice is to get both a B.F.A. and an M.F.A.”
Klotz also holds a teaching certification in secondary art from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, which provided her with opportunities to teach in public schools for several years. Subsequently she has taught at the college level. “I love teaching in higher education,” she said. “It’s a joy to assist students in bringing forth their untapped expressions.”