Susanna E. Lewis (1938 – July 15, 2021) was an American

fiber artist Fiber art (fibre art in British spelling) refers to fine art whose material consists of natural or synthetic fiber and other components, such as fabric or yarn. It focuses on the materials and on the manual labor on the part of the artist as ...

, teacher and author known for her contributions to the Art to Wear movement.

Biography and Work

The daughter of an

Army Air Forces The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF or AAF) was the major land-based aerial warfare service component of the United States Army and ''de facto'' aerial warfare service branch of the United States during and immediately after World War II ...

officer, Lewis received a BA from

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

and an MA from the Teachers College of Columbia University. She later attended the

Pratt Institute Pratt Institute is a private university with its main campus in Brooklyn, New York (state), New York. It has a satellite campus in Manhattan and an extension campus in Utica, New York at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. The school was ...

. Lewis was active in Art to Wear movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Inspired by

Mary Walker Phillips Mary Walker Phillips (November 23, 1923 – November 3, 2007) was an American textile artist, author and teacher. She revolutionized the craft of hand knitting by exploring knitting as an independent art form. In the catalog to her 1984 Fres ...

she bought a knitting machine (the Passap Duomatic 5) in 1971 and taught herself, beginning to create hangings and garments in the late 1970s. She is known for her highly decorated textile wearable pieces, a direction she was encouraged to take by Julie Schafler Dale, her gallerist. For instance, the ''Moth Cape'' represented a nightmare, "''wherein a feeling of death enveloped her like the wings of a giant moth''". The weight and shape of the piece meant the wearer could share that experience. Lewis was also an author of knitting books, and contributor to knitting magazines, including ''A Machine Knitter’s Guide To Creating Fabrics'' (with Julia Weissman), considered foundational to the craft, and ''Knitting lace''. She taught at Parsons School of Design about machine knitting in the 1980s.

Collections and Exhibitions

Lewis' work can be found in the collections of: *

The Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...

* The

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

*The

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...

References

American textile artists People in knitting Pratt Institute alumni 2021 deaths 1938 births {{Portal bar, Textile Arts, border=no