Solo Exhibition: Susan R. Kirshenbaum

Thin Skin, Life’s Layers

Susan R. Kirshenbaum at Black & White Projects

Exhibition Dates: Aug 8, 2026 – Oct 24, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, Aug 8, 2–5pm
Artist’s Talk: Saturday, Sep 19, 2–5pm
Closing Party: Saturday, Oct 24, 2–5pm
Location: BWP at Pacific Felt Factory Arts Complex, 2830 20th St, Studio 106, San Francisco 94110
Hours: Open Fridays 1–5pm and Wed–Sat by appointment

RSVP to events at luma.com/BWP

What does the body remember after decades of living?

What remains visible when time has thinned the skin but deepened the spirit?

Black & White Projects presents Thin Skin, Life’s Layers, a new exhibition by Susan R. Kirshenbaum that gathers together more than twenty large-scale figurative collages from her Women and Nature series. Created over the last nine years, these works invite viewers into a conversation about aging, vulnerability, liberation, and the quiet power of inhabiting one’s own body.

Each artwork begins with a life drawing—a swift gesture captured from a living model. From there, Kirshenbaum builds each composition by weaving together her drawings with original abstract paintings and photographs made during her travels. Layer by layer, image by image, the works become landscapes of memory where the human figure and the natural world exist as one continuous story.

Some figures carry tenderness. Others carry defiance. Some seem wrapped in warmth while others stand exposed with remarkable calm. Across the exhibition, the body is never presented as an object to be observed, but as a living archive—holding desire, strength, anger, sensuality, joy, fragility, and resilience all at once.

For Kirshenbaum, this exhibition is also deeply personal. It represents nearly a decade of work and a return to full-time artistic practice after forty years. She reflects on aging as a continual layering and shedding of experience.

Physical skin becomes thinner with time, yet emotional life often grows richer and more complex. The artist asks what it means to become increasingly visible to oneself while becoming less visible to society. Can aging itself become an act of quiet resistance? Can simply existing—fully, honestly, and without apology—be a form of activism?

As the artist writes:

“People say, ‘Your art is classical, a bit like Matisse. Pretty.’ But I say my work is subversive—that I’m pushing the boundaries of figurative art.”

Working across drawing, photography, and digital collage, Kirshenbaum explores body liberation, feminism, nudity, flesh, fragility, nature, and the Rights of Nature movement. Rather than offering conclusions, Thin Skin, Life’s Layers opens a space where viewers are invited to linger with questions about identity, visibility, belonging, and our shared relationship with the living world.

The exhibition will be on view from August 8, 2026, through October 24, 2026.

About Susan R. Kirshenbaum

Encouraged from childhood to pursue art and photography, Susan R. Kirshenbaum studied and worked at her family’s art school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Throughout her career she has been an artist, educator, administrator, marketer, and active participant in both the Bay Area arts community and women’s business organizations. Thin Skin, Life’s Layers marks an important chapter in her return to a full-time studio practice.