Kleckner, Susan

Background on Susan Kleckner

A pioneering filmmaker, artist, and activist, Susan Kleckner was a fixture in the art scene in New York City from the 1960s until the early 2000s. Largely self-taught as an artist, she worked across several media including photography, film, drawing, collage, installation, text, and performance, and she was a prolific diarist who recorded her life extensively in illustrated journals. As an active participant in the women’s and peace movements, she made little distinction between politics, art, and life, and believed in using art to empower the voices of women and minorities and as a tool for peace and social progress.

Kleckner was born in New York City on July 5, 1941, one of four children of Anita (Roth) and Charles Kleckner. Following the death of her father in 1955 and her mother’s hospitalization in the following year, Kleckner left home at the age of 16, supporting herself by working in stores and restaurants. In her early twenties, she took up photography seriously and despite limited formal education, drifted toward teaching as a profession. In the mid-1960s, she began working as a counselor for people with intellectual disabilities, combining her love for teaching and art later in the decade when she became the first female photography instructor at the Pratt Institute.

During this intensely creative period, Kleckner’s art, politics, and personal life were deeply interwoven. Active with Women Artists in Revolution (WAR) and Feminists in the Arts, she helped to found the Women’s Interart Center (WIC), a venue to support women in the arts and train women in technology and integrated arts practices. Her move into filmmaking drew upon this foundation in the feminist arts. Three Lives, a 16-millimeter film made in collaboration with Louva Irvine and Kate Millett, became a landmark and is often considered the first documentary about women produced by an all-woman crew. The film focuses on the daily lives and struggles of three “ordinary” women, one who had fled a bad marriage for a new life in New York City, another a middle-aged chemist, and the third, a “nice Jewish girl” who had become a bisexual performance artist.

After Three Lives, Kleckner was invited to join another team of women filmmakers to work on a feminist documentary about the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami. Featuring the voices of major figures in the women’s rights movement, including Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Bella Abzug, Another Look centered on the presidential candidacy of Shirley Chisholm, who had the triple distinction being the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress and both the first African American and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s nomination.

Meanwhile, Kleckner was beginning her first self-directed film project, Birth Film, a provocative and intimate documentary about a live, at-home birth. Birth Film drew controversy from the time of its premier at the Whitney Museum in 1973: reviewers described audience members becoming sick due to the film’s graphic nature. Hurt by this reception, Kleckner took several years off from film projects, returning to film only in the 1970s with projects such as Pierre Film, Amazing Grace, Bag Lady, and Desert Piece.

Between 1984 and 1987, Kleckner resided for extended periods at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in England, documenting the encampment founded in 1981 in response to the housing of American cruise missiles at the RAF Greenham Common base. During the years of its operation, tens of thousands of people from around the world participated in demonstrations at the camp, which was run by the women and sustained by donations. Members of the camp took part in civil disobedience to protest the siting of missiles in England, including trespassing and decorating the off-limits fence around the base. Although constantly evicted and arrested, the women maintained the encampment for nearly two decades, continuing even after removal of the missiles.

Inspired by Greenham, Kleckner organized one of her best-known works of art, Window Peace, a year-long performance in the storefront of SoHoZat, an underground magazine and comic book store in SoHo. Each week, a female artist occupied the 5 by 6.5 foot display area furnished with a few basic amenities: a bed, portable toilet, television and tape deck, telephone, fridge, hot plate, and a curtain for privacy. During their “vigil,” the women could do whatever they wished with the time and space, provided they remained in the window for the duration of the week. For her own part, Kleckner spent her time editing footage collected from Greenham Common into a video called Greenham Tapes. While her journals reveal the stresses involved in organizing Window Peace, the project was highly acclaimed, receiving the Susan B. Anthony Award from the National Organization for Women in 1988.

Beyond her artwork and activism, Kleckner was admired for her teaching, and particularly at the International Center for Photography (ICP) where she taught from 1982 to 2010. At ICP, she developed and taught courses such as New York at Night, Visual Diary, and Roll-a-Day. She impressed on her students the importance of personal identity and daily practice, both of which were significant elements in her own work. In addition to teaching at ICP, Kleckner taught and led workshops at schools such as Pratt, NYU, and UMass Amherst.

Throughout her life, Kleckner struggled with mental illness, surviving serious episodes of depression and multiple hospitalizations, which she documented in her art and writing. In the early 1980s, she became involved with Re-evaluation Counseling, a holistic, group-based approach to therapy and social change, becoming an RC group leader and leading co-counseling workshops which incorporated photography and other artistic practices. In 2002, her role as a support leader became that of a spiritual one when she was ordained interfaith minister by the New Seminary in New York.

Although diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2004, Kleckner continued to teach, advise, and make art, and even began to volunteer with SHARE, an organization devoted to supporting women with ovarian and breast cancers. After six years of fighting her illness, she succumbed to cancer on July 7, 2010.