Susannah Lee Griffee is an abstract expressionist painter whose work explores lucid dreaming, inherited memory, split selves, and the relationship between our conscious and subconscious perspectives of ourselves and our world. She has lived and worked in Memphis, Chicago, New York, and Paris, where she is currently based. She has exhibited in Memphis, New York and Paris, most recently at Ideal Glass Studios in New York in April 2025.

Every person and thing has a layer of subjectivity woven into it. Like a television screen going in and out of static, shifting color, the object changes as we view it. If you view an object from multiple perspectives at once – from your “real” self, from your dream self, from what you imagine others past and present might see – you see a fragmented but somehow more real version of the thing. This is what my painting is trying to capture.

“Letters from My Mother” superimposes my dreams, symbols that remind me of my mother (doves, stained glass windows, hidden houses), and my religious upbringing on a mythical version of New York City, my adopted hometown. “Black Hole” makes this layered view more abstract – windows doubling as doors (and vice versa), different perspectives folding into each other until it’s not clear which way is up or down.

Other paintings layer the present onto the historical past. “After the Last Supper” reimagines the famous biblical scene as a kind of detached debauchery, with figures fending for themselves in a world that’s somehow violent and playful at the same time. Similarly “Hand to Mouth/Swimmers” takes the classic image of blissful bathers dancing and imagines it as a string of three people in a frantic dance, each struggling to help out the next person. It’s unclear whether or not they succeed, but the spectacle and the struggle take place simultaneously.

My life and my paintings exist in this push-pull between eutopia and dystopia, where at any given moment the world can look like one, or weirder, both at the same time. “Eutopia” means “good place,” but we generally use the word “utopia,” meaning “no place,” or that the good place that we imagine cannot exist. “Dystopia,” of course, means “bad place”. Looking at a subject from many perspectives allows me to see it in all three of these places at once. This is also how existence feels to me.

EXHIBITS (Paintings)

Memphis College of Art, 2010

NYU Paris, 2012

So Brutal It Feels Like Home (550 West 29, NYC), 2023

Soho Art Walks (NYC), multiple, 2023

Not For Them NYC, multiple, 2023

Not For Them NYC / White Hot Magazine (Selina Hotel, Chelsea, NYC), Fall 2023

Letters from My Mother, Ideal Glass Studios (NYC), March 2024

The Only Way Out Is Through, Ideal Glass Studios (NYC), April 2025

PUBLISHED WORK (Writings)

The New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/susannah-griffee)

The New York Times (https://archive.nytimes.com/learning.blogs.nytimes.com/author/susannah-griffee/)

Mercer Street

I. Finding New York (https://cas.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/casEWP/documents/griffeefinding05.pdf)

II. Trinity (On DH Lawrence and God) (https://cas.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/casEWP/documents/griffeetrinityd08.pdf)

Shoe Leather (https://shoeleathermagazine.com/2014/griffee/)