Susan L. Halper Fine Arts, Inc was founded over twenty-five years ago by Susan L. Halper. Equipped with a Bachelor’s degree from Barnard College and a Master’s Degree in Art History from University of Pennsylvania, Ms. Halper worked for over a decade at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Working closely with director Thomas M. Messer, Ms. Halper ran the internship training program and was central to the museum’s management which entailed numerous other responsibilities. Beginning in 1983, Ms. Halper began her own business of art dealership and advised clients in buying and selling and, additionally, organized a number of exhibitions of contemporary art. She also managed a sizeable contemporary art collection in New York City.

Ms. Halper has a special interest in works on paper including unique works in various media as well as original prints which are increasingly full of invention and technological creativity. She recently published a portfolio of three lithographs by the up and coming Brooklyn artist, Francks Francois Deceus who is interested in identity politics. She exhibited the photographs of four artists at the exhibition Photo NY in October ’06: Herbert Tilly, a young French photographer and cinematographer who transmutes city images into minimalist gems , Gwenn Thomas who showed her lyrical photographs (Breeze) 2002-03, which play off Marcel Duchamp’s photograph of an air vent, Adrienne Walker Hoard, who makes strong abstract images of Ndebele women of S.Africa and Burhan Dogancay whose unique photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge during its renovation in 1986 are intriguing. Dogancay, Turkey’s best-known living artist who will be exhibiting his collages which derive from his decades-long observation of walls of the world at the Pera Museum, Turkey, in May 2008 with Villegle, a French artist also known for his unique collages.

Works by artists Roberta Allen, Louise Bourgeois, James Surls, Jean Shin, James Rosenquist,Alfred Jensen, Gerhard Richter, Damien Hirst, Frantisek Kupka, Jeff Kellar, James Siena, Tara Donovan, Robert Longo, Wangechi Mutu, Yasmine Chatila,Yimin Huang , Alessandro Tofanelli, Ross Bleckner, Christopher Wool, and others have attracted Ms. Halper’s attention.

Due to her recent association with the work of the distinguished and important African –American artist, Norman Lewis, Ms. Halper has gradually developed an intensified interest in other African-American artists like Fred Wilson, Vincent Smith, Glenn Ligon, Howardena Pindell, Martin Puryear, Wangechi Mutu, Sam Gilliam, Robert Penn (video), Carol Pope, Emma Amos, Gregory Coates and Ilona Rozeal Brown. Norman Lewis was a pivotal figure. As a founding member of the Black artist’s collective, Spiral (with Bearden, Woodruff, Alston and others) and the Cinque Gallery (with Bearden and Ernest Chrichlow), he became an artist of great influence and importance for generations of Black artists. Lewis painted at the same time as the Abstract-Expressionist American like Reinhardt (a friend), de Kooning, Kline and Motherwell. In his fully realized paintings of the 50s and 60s, he began to reduce figuration to markings that fit his more formal ideas of abstraction on canvas as well as on paper. Still, the social potential of his subject matter (blackness) was undeniable and his political activities mirrored his visual ideas. This gallery has many fine example of Lewis’work-paintings as well as works on paper from the 1940s-1960s