Susan Rankaitis
American artist and photographer (born 1949)
Susan Rankaitis (born 1949) is an American multimedia artist working primarily in painting, photography and drawing. Rankaitis began her career in the 1970s as an abstract painter. Visiting the Art Institute of Chicago while in graduate school, she had a transformative encounter with the photograms of the artist László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), whose abstract works of the 1920s and 1940s she saw as "both painting and photography." Rankaitis began to develop her own experimental methods for producing abstract and conceptual artworks related both to painting and photography.
Rankaitis draws on science in her work—particularly ideas generated through research in the fields of biology and neuroscience and she collaborates regularly with scientists on interdisciplinary projects.
Education
MFA, Painting and Photography, University of Southern California, School of Fine Arts (1977)
BFA, Painting, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, School of Art and Design (1971)
Solo exhibitions
2017: Light Play: Experiments in Photography, 1970 to the Present, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
2017: Grey Matters, Robert Mann Gallery, New York, NY
2007: Limbicwork, Robert Mann Gallery, New York, NY
2005: Limbicwork: Pertaining to the Nature of Borders, Europos Parkas, Vilnius, Lithuania (outdoor)
2000: Susan Rankaitis: Drawn from Science, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA
1998: Science as Art: Susan Rankaitis, Indiana University/Purdue University Cultural Arts Gallery, Indianapolis, IN
1997: Gold Science Ghost Drawings, Robert Mann Gallery, New York, NY
1994: Susan Rankaitis: Abstracting Science, Nature and Technology, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL
1992: DNA Series: Susan Rankaitis, Ruth Bloom Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
1991: Susan Rankaitis: Encounters, Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, AZ
1983: Susan Rankaitis: Inherent in Flight, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
1983: Susan Rankaitis: L'Avion, L'Avion, International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY
Academic career
Rankaitis has served since 1990 as Fletcher Jones Chair in Studio Art at Scripps College in Claremont, California.
“Susan Rankaitis” enters the record as american artist and photographer (born 1949). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Susan, Rankaitis and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29452325. VIAF identifies the subject as 278470753. The Library of Congress control number is n84221835. 3 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949, 1895, 1946 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “Susan Rankaitis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.