Suzanne Anker is a bioart pioneer, visual artist, and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. Her practice investigates the ways in which nature is being altered in the 21st century. Concerned with genetics, climate change, species extinction, and toxic degradation, she calls attention to the beauty of life and the “necessity for enlightened thinking about nature’s ‘tangled bank.’” Anker’s exhibitions have been the subject of reviews and articles in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art, Newsweek, Nature, and Vogue.
Anker’s work has been shown at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; Daejeon Biennale, South Korea; Chronus Art Center, Shanghai; ZHI Art Museum, Chengdu, China; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; Today Art Museum, Beijing; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; MoMA PS1, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, Berlin; ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry; Pera Museum, Istanbul; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; and the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia.
Her books include The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age, coauthored with the late sociologist Dorothy Nelkin, published in 2004 by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press and Visual Culture and Bioscience, copublished by University of Maryland and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC. Her writings have appeared in Art and America, Seed Magazine, Nature Reviews Genetics, Art Journal, Tema Celeste, and M/E/A/N/I/N/G. Anker has hosted 20 episodes of the Bio-Blurb Show, an Internet radio program originally on WPS1 Art Radio, in collaboration with MoMA, now archived on Alana Heiss’ Clocktower Productions.
Since 2005, Anker has chaired the Fine Arts Department at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York. She continues to interweave traditional and experimental media in her department’s new digital initiative and the SVA Bio Art Laboratory.
Presented in partnership with SAIC’s Conversations on Art and Science Series
Suzanne Anker's Radio Programming
Roniger, Taney. “Suzanne Anker & Frank Gillette: Strata,” The Brooklyn Rail. May 2019
Krolik, Julia. “Creators – Suzanne Anker,” Art the Science. 29 March 2017
