Susan Goldstein was born in the middle of the last century in Indianapolis, Indiana and moved to Boulder, CO to attend college in 1968. After moving to Denver in 1978 she began working for Denver’s weekly newspaper, Westword, eventually becoming the staff photographer. An admitted “late bloomer” at 49, she pivoted from the world of journalism to fine art.
Goldstein has been described by Denver’s art critics as a multifaceted artist who in addition to creating many photographic and photo-based bodies of work, has successfully made sculpture from antique office supplies, addressed a variety of political issues using collage and installation and explored mixing materials to make new imagery. The most recent collage work, Bending Time, unites her love of collecting, photography and collage. The pandemic created a new opportunity to work with existing materials in her studio and led to a new body of lens-based photographs, The Covid-19 Inside Out Series.
The following is taken from curator Simon Zalkind’s essay written for Goldstein’s 2006 Retrospective Exhibit, Coming to America, at the Singer Gallery in Denver, Colorado. “Goldstein is a restless forager – a connoisseur of fragments, emblems, numinous talismans and enchanted bric-a-brac. Her studio brims with charged objects, artifacts and souvenirs that are displayed instinctively and innocently, restoring the objects of the past to the pleasure of the present. In the series of collages called Intersections, (which predated the photo collages in Bending Time) her indebtedness to the surrealist enterprise – to chance, serendipity, intuition – is evident enough. The smaller the world can be condensed, the more safely it can contain the dynamism and danger of daydreams and reverie.”
Goldstein’s photographic work is included in numerous collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art, Joaquim Paiva Collection, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, Luz Astral Foundation, Buenos Aires, Argentina, The Crawford Hotel, Union Station, Denver, CO. and the Colorado Photographic Arts Center. Her work has been exhibited extensively including at the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Griffin Museum of Photography’s Stoneham Gallery, Colorado Photographic Art Center, and Colorado College’s Idea Space.