Susan Moldenhauer

Artist Statement

Since then is from a body of work that I began on the eve of the 2017 Presidential Inauguration, and in the same year of my retirement from a 33-year career in arts administration, curation, and community arts advocacy. While I had been making cloud images for many years, I now began to place them in new world contexts using found text from the news, personal experiences, and celestial events as titles. Its underpinnings have been from a time and place perspective on my time of life, American history in the making, and global concerns such as climate change, war, and the pandemic. The juxtaposition of image and title, both captured within a 24-hour timeframe using the immediacy of the iPhone, is one of finding resonance between them through the emotive power of cloud imagery.

Biography

Susan Moldenhauer has been a fine art photographer since she graduated with her MFA from Penn State in 1982. She has a national exhibition record, is represented in numerous public collections, and has self-published books. Moldenhauer’s photographic work has used the landscape as its foundational element to explore light and shadow, time and place, and the poetic symmetry of the moment. Since 1982, she has worked collaboratively with Jennifer Anne Tucker exploring image conversations, the use of fabrics in image-making, and most recently, creating an image dialogue relating eastern/western skies. Since 2008, Sequencing Through Time and Place, a creative collaboration with artist Wendy Lemen Bredehoft and dancer/choreographer Margaret Wilson has explored place through on-location research in visual art, dance/choreography, and photography. Her extensive arts administrative and curatorial work began at Penn State in 1984 when she became the School of Visual Arts Gallery Manager. In 1986, she was appointed the Director and Curator of Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, VA. In 1991, she became the Curator of Museum Programs at the University of Wyoming Art Museum, and in 2002, she became its Director and Chief Curator. She retired in 2017 to pursue her studio practice full time. Moldenhauer has been a community advocate for artists and co-founded the Laramie Artists Project which presents the biennial exhibition, Touchstone Laramie. She also co-founded such public art programs as the Laramie Mural Project and Laramie Public Art Coalition. In 2016 and 2023, she received Wyoming Arts Council Fellowships and in 2017, her personal work and state-wide community achievements were recognized as she won a Wyoming Governor’s Arts Award. She lives and works in Laramie, WY.

Learn More

You can learn more or purchase Susan’s artwork outside of Touchstone on her website at www.susanmoldenhauer.com or follow her online at www.facebook.com/susanmoldenhauer and on Instagram @moldenhauerphotostudio.