Susana’s Room, an art exhibit at El Museo Cultural Galleries at 555 Camino de la Familia in Santa Fe­­­­, features drawings, paintings, and memorabilia from Susana’s Mexico years, alongside her daughter, Catherine’s, new retablos and recent paintings—many of them immersed with her mother’s life. The exhibit opens on March 23 at 4:00 PM and runs through May 15 at 5:00 PM. Free and open to the public.

Installations reflect the time Susana Dickinson Ferguson spent in Mexico. And her work since, until her death in 2014. She studied art in Mexico in the 1940’s at the Escuela de Pinturas y Escultura. Among her teachers were Frida Kahlo, Francisco Zuñiga and Jesus Guerrero Galván.

New and selected artworks by Catherine Ferguson will also incude her hand-made artist books of Mother poetry. Catherine is an award winning author and illustrator. New World Saints, a 1995 limited edition collection of hand-colored prints from her drawings with text by Spanish colonial scholar Dr. Donna Pierce was internationally acclaimed.

Poetry readings and discussions times will be announced.

Catherine Ferguson was born in Mexico City. She grew up in Scottsdale, studied art at the University of Arizona and moved to Santa Fe in 1972 where she began to paint retablos. She adopted naturalism when she partnered with Bill Isaacs in Galisteo—which deepened her nature and birds renditions in landscapes and word. New World Saints, a 1995 limited edition collection of hand-colored prints from her drawings with text by Spanish colonial scholar Dr. Donna Pierce, produced by the Press of the Palace of the Governors, was internationally acclaimed. Catherine has authored/co-authored several chapbooks and books. The Sound a Raven Makes won the New Mexico Book Award for Poetry in 2007. She has illustrated a number of books. You Who Make the Sky Bend won the New Mexico Book Award–Religious Category in 2011. Her video-poem collaboration Two Ravens with whynotapoemproductions was selected for the 3MinuteFilm Festival in 2012. Her latest book of poems I Thought You Would Be Shelter published by Sunstone Press was released in 2017. She teaches painting and is still producing art and poetry, her previous El Museo installation The Woman on the Bed series.

Susan Ferguson (b. 1921, d. 2014) was born Susan Dickinson in Detroit, Michigan, but her home has been in the Southwest United States and Mexico. She studied at the University of Arizona where she was introduced to the work of Georgia O’Keefe. During the next eight years she studied in Mexico, first at the Instituto in San Miguel de Allende and then at the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura, S.E.P., (“La Esmeralda”) in Mexico City. Her teachers included Frida Kahlo and Francisco Zuñiga. Here, she met and married the artist James Ferguson. After his death she returned to the United Sates with their two daughters. She worked as a teacher, social worker, and Indian trader. Her artwork has been exhibited in the Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Arizona State University, and the Athenaeum in La Jolla, California where she lived, splitting her time there and in Tesuque, New Mexico between her two artist daughters, Catherine Ferguson and Gwenn Beope.