Suzanne Anker

Suzanne Anker is a visual artist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. She works in a variety of mediums ranging from digital sculpture and installation to large-scale photography as well as botanical specimens. As a pioneer of Bio Art, an expanding international art movement, Suzanne Anker has created the first Bio Art Laboratory in a Fine Arts Department in the United States. Employing digital tools coupled by the hand-made and those made by nature, her work investigates the ways in which nature is being altered in the 21st century. Concerned with climate change, species extinction and toxic degradation, her work calls attention to the beauty of nature and the necessity for enlightened thinking about nature’s “tangled bank.” 

A notable installation by Suzanne Anker entitled Astroculture (Eternal Return) was prominently featured in the exhibition The Value of Food (2015) in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Presented in a chapel, the work consisted of vegetable producing plants grown from seed employing the same LED light technology used by NASA to grow plants in space.

Anker’s work has been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institute, the Phillips Collection, P.S.1 Museum, the JP Getty Museum, the Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charite in Berlin, the Center for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, the Pera Museum in Istanbul, the Museum of Modern Art in Japan, and the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. 

Courtesy of the Artist