Susan Klein is a contemporary artist based in Charleston, South Carolina. Working across sculpture and painting, her practice explores the intersection of ritual, materiality, and the body, using symbolic language to examine creative energy, touch, and the tension between physical and spiritual experience.
Klein received her MFA from the University of Oregon in 2004 and her BFA from the University of New Hampshire in 2001. A recipient of the 2020–2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Klein has also been awarded numerous residencies and fellowships, including the Dunedin School of Art (New Zealand), the Hambidge Center, Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, Wassaic Project, the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), Vermont Studio Center (full fellowship), Ox-Bow School of Art (Summer Fellowship), Otis College of Art and Design, and Arteles Creative Research Center (Finland). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including “I Should Have Been a Pair of Ragged Claws” at the Wassaic Project (New York), “A Window Scrubbed for the Moon” at Asya Geisberg Gallery (New York), and “Volcano Lovers” at Frontviews (Berlin).
In addition to her studio practice, she has contributed writing to The Coastal Post and served as a member and co-director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville. She is currently Associate Professor of Art and Chair of the Studio Art Department at the College of Charleston. Her work positions sculpture as devotional object and painting as energetic invocation, emphasizing the sacred nature of touch and the act of making. Through this duality, Klein investigates the parallels between spiritual longing and bodily desire, creating works that inhabit the charged space between the tangible and the intangible.
