Culture Now: Susan Cianciolo

New York artist and designer Susan Cianciolo is in conversation with curator Marketa Uhlirova, presenting on her diverse practice.

Bridging the gap between art and fashion, for over 20 years, Cianciolo has amassed a body of work that wilfully evades categorisation, exploiting the false dichotomies of art and design, event and document. The artist-designer behind the cult 1990s label Run, Cianciolo revels in a truly interdisciplinary approach to making, working across craft, performance, publishing, fashion and art. Acknowledged as a significant precursor for the resurgence of attention to craft, and specifically to texture and materiality, her work is now understood to have greatly influenced recent artmaking.

Susan Cianciolo (b. 1969, lives and works in New York) holds a BFA from Parsons School of Design, Paris, New York and Winchester School of Art. Fashion design experience includes: Designer, Susan Cianciolo Collection 2 (2001 – 12); Collection Founder and Designer, RUN (1995 – 2001); Production Manager, X-Girl (1995); Assistant Designer, Badgley Mischka (1993 - 1995). Selected solo exhibitions include: Susan Cianciolo, Yale Union, Portland, Oregon, (2016); “Though I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not Love, I am nothing” ‘Corinthians’, 356 S. Mission Road, Los Angeles, California, (2016); and if God COMes to visit You, HOW will you know? (the great tetrahedral kite), Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York, (2015).

Marketa Uhlirova is Director and Curator of Fashion in Film and Senior Research Fellow in Fashion History and Theory at Central Saint Martins College, University of the Arts London. Her film programmes have been hosted by arts venues internationally, including Tate Modern, ICA, The Barbican, BFI Southbank, Danish Film Institute and Museum of the Moving Image, New York. She also edits Fashion in Film's publications, including, most recently, Birds of Paradise: Costume as Cinematic Spectacle (2013) and Marcel L'Herbier: Dossier (2014, with Caroline Evans). She has contributed articles on cinema, fashion, art and photography to magazines and books, including Aperture, AnOther, Art Monthly, Fashion Theory and Fashion Media: Past & Present.