Knockdown Center is pleased to present Brick and Mortar: MASSIVE, a new work by Sue Havens as a part of Knockdown Center’s FiftyTwo Ft. series of commissioned wall-based artworks in the East Corridor.

Sue Havens is an artist interested in the interplay between painting and ceramics. Her work is influenced by the visual world around her: glimpses of things from daily life such as buildings, pavement lines, commercial packaging, tree bark, auto body signs, and 1970’s knit sweaters are embedded in the pattern, texture, and form of her work across disciplines.

At Knockdown Center, Brick and Mortar: MASSIVE will be Havens’ largest scale painting to date. The visual language of this site-specific work will continue Havens’ practice of culling from her everyday surroundings while also incorporating gestural influences from Turkey and from kilim rugs to the ruins of Ephesus. Havens’ disparate sources mingle and surface in large brushstrokes and layered patterns producing a playful grid. As a whole, the work emerges as an integrated landscape that oscillates between flat and dimensional, sturdy and precarious, irregular and precise.

Sue Havens is an artist based in New York and Tampa. Havens received her BFA in Art from The Cooper Union for The Advancement of Science and Art in 1995, and her MFA in painting from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2003. Havens is a 2008 Fellowship recipient in Painting from The New York Foundation for the Arts and most recently a recipient of the 2017 McKnight Junior Faculty Development Fellowship. She is currently an assistant Professor of Art at The University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida.

Havens has exhibited internationally and nationally in venues such as Galerie Nord in Berlin, The Museum of Drawings in Laholm, Sweden, Regina Rex, Jeff Bailey, PS 122, Postmasters, Frederich Petzel, Art in General, Momenta Art, Sara Meltzer, OK Harris, Pierogi, The Houghton Gallery at The Cooper Union, The Parlour in Bushwick, New York, and Mindy Solomon in Miami among others. Havens was a 2008 Fellowship recipient in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts and most recently, a recipient of the 2017 McKnight Junior Faculty Development Fellowship. Havens authored, designed and illustrated the book Make Your Own Toys (2010). She holds a BFA from The Cooper Union, and a MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School of The Arts at Bard College. Her work was most recently featured in Warhol’s Interview Magazine.