Sue Havens

Associate Professor, Painting & Drawing
MFA, The Milton Avery Graduate School of The Arts at Bard College
Phone: (813) 974-2360
Email: havens@usf.edu
Office: FAH 255

Website: http://www.suehavensstudio.com

Sue Havens makes paintings and sculptures that combine paradoxical, formal elements. She describes her work as geometric with a built-in wobble. The tension between disparate combinations such as flatness and dimensionality produce an intuitive logic. Her works demand sustained looking in order to make sense of this logic. The painting titled “Brick and Mortar” (2016) appears to be a quilt of patterns found in nature. Delineated sections cause the patterns to recede or jut into the viewer’s space. Planes of abstraction disrupt the flat surface and defamiliarizes the material.

Havens has exhibited internationally and nationally in spaces such as Galerie Nord in Berlin; Teckningmuseet (The Museum of Drawings) in Laholm, Sweden; and The Parlour in Bushwick, New York. She was a 2008 Fellowship recipient in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Havens authored, designed and illustrated the book “Make Your Own Toys” (2010). She holds a BFA from The Cooper Union, and an MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School of The Arts at Bard College.