Sue Ferguson Gussow, professor emerita at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, is a figurative artist working in a wide range of drawing and painting media. For more than 50 years, she has been instrumental in training Cooper Union architecture students, via freehand drawing, to think spatially through communication between their eyes, minds, and hands. In that time, she has also amassed a trove of her own work—intimate portraits of people in her life, from immediate family, including her late husband, to fellow Cooper Union faculty and alumni. Now, the School of Architecture presents a retrospective of her lifetime body of work in the college’s Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery from October 12 through November 17, 2023.  

The exhibition features 39 oil paintings as well as 47 charcoal and pastel drawings by the 88-year-old artist who remains active to this day producing new works in her Amagansett studio. The paintings and drawings in Sue Ferguson Gussow: Retrospective stretch as far back as her student days to as recently as this summer, when she produced a charcoal portrait of Hayley Eber, acting dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture and a painting of Anik Person and Elizabeth Graziolo, both 1995 graduates of the School of Architecture. 

“Drawing is both compulsion and connection,” explains Gussow of her practice and why the figure has played a central role in her work since she was a child. “There is intimacy in capturing the essence of a person. I prefer to work from people I know. These portraits have become a way of keeping family, including my extended Cooper family, with me. These images fill my studio and my home. Their memories stay with me and keep me company long after a work is completed.” 

Gussow, who studied at Cooper from 1953 through 1956, bucked the trend by focusing on the human figure at a time when abstract expression was ascendant. Such work did not compel her, even as her all-male instructors encouraged it. The figure has been a principal area of focus throughout her career, and the show’s earliest painting, a self-portrait painted as a student in 1955, reflects that compelling focus. Alongside portraits, the exhibition also includes works shaped by the narratives of women’s lives. This includes a series of dresses, among them the dance gown worn by Balanchine principal dancer Karin von Aroldingen, that hold an imprint of the body and its implicit gestures and movements, as well as a series of seated pregnant women. There are also flower and doll studies, objects that are historically categorized as feminine. 

Sue Ferguson Gussow: Retrospective is the second retrospective The Cooper Union has mounted of Gussow’s work. The first was held in 1997, nearly 20 years after she developed the freehand drawing program in the School of Architecture that she taught for decades and that has influenced educators at other schools, nationally and globally. Of her work, Paul Goldberger, then critic at The New York Times, wrote “If there is any theme to her work … it is to use the art of composition to provide insights into human sensibility…. The positioning of her figures on the canvas, their direction and stance, is in many ways the most eloquent thing about her work.”

“The hand is an integral part of the creative process, and at The Cooper Union we embrace freehand drawing as a critical component of our pedagogy, especially now as new technologies and digital tools become the norm in architecture,” say Acting Dean Eber who is also a 2003 alumna. “This exhibition of Professor Gussow’s lifetime body of work tells a story about both the creative process and the familiar characters of her life.”

“Her study of the human form is multilayered,” says curator Steven Hillyer, a 1990 graduate of the School of Architecture and the director of the Architecture Archive. “Her portraits are not necessarily about capturing a photographic likeness. Rather, each work is a carefully rendered narrative. In the case of couples and families, the works also provide subtle cues on relationships.”

Gussow’s work can be found at numerous museums such as the Brooklyn Museum; Cooper Hewitt,  Smithsonian Design Museum; and the Dallas Museum of Fine Art. Her notable solo exhibitions include shows at the New Orleans Museum of Art (1966); Stanford Museum (1983)—honoring her year at Stanford University as the Pamela Djerassi Visiting Artist (1982-83); the Center for Contemporary Art (Bedminster, New Jersey, 2015); and Front Art Space (2017). She has received grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Tides Foundation. She is the author of Draw Poker (1997) and Architects Draw (2008).

A second, updated edition of Architects Draw will be published by Architectural Publisher B/Gilbert Hansen to celebrate the close of the retrospective.

Images courtesy of the artist