Suzanne Adan I'm No Spring Chicken

Suzanne Adan (born 1946) creates personal universes that combine fantasy, popular culture, and autobiography. Approximately 75 of these compelling works, in a variety of media, are included in Suzanne Adan: I'm No Spring Chicken , a retrospective assembled in her 80th year. A native Californian, Adan was born in Woodland and raised in nearby Yolo. She earned her BA and MA from Sacramento State College in 1969 and 1971, respectively. It was there that she met her husband, sculptor Michael Stevens, and became influenced by instructor Jim Nutt, a member of Chicago's Hairy Who. Nutt and his wife, artist Gladys Nilsson, along with a host of others in Sacramento, Davis, and the San Francisco Bay Area, caused Adan to appreciate the place that humor could have in art, as did her experience exhibiting at the trailblazing Candy Store Gallery in Folsom. Over time, the vintage toy and Halloween collections that she and Stevens assembled proved inspirational as well. Today, with some 55 years of making art behind her, Adan continues to create surreal assemblies of whimsical characters, toys, and animals that simultaneously disturb, charm, and disrupt, all through her beautifully fastidious approach and signature swatches of paint.