Susan Hauptman

George Adams Gallery is pleased to present a selection of drawings by Susan Hauptman (1947-2015). The exhibition is the artist’s first with the gallery.

Hauptman (1947-2015) is best known for her austere and subtly provocative charcoal self-portraits and poetic still-life drawings incorporating porcelain figurines, five of which are featured in the exhibition. Also included in the exhibition is her whimsical and perhaps most ambitious work, "Self-portrait (with Feathers)," 2007, and a charcoal portrait of her husband, Leonard, from 1991.

Susan Hauptman was born in Detroit, Michigan, and studied at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan, and received her MFA from Wayne State University in 1970. She has had solo museum shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Oakland Museum, the Triton Museum, the Norton Gallery, and the University of Georgia, where she held the Dodd Chair. In 2020, Wayne State University mounted a solo show of her line drawings.

Hauptman’s work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Norton Gallery of Art, Palm Beach, FL; the Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA; the California Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA; and the Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI; among others. She was the recipient of two Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Gottlieb Foundation grant.