Becky Suss, a Wyncote native and renowned artist, is closing out her inaugural exhibition at Chattanooga’s Institute of Contemporary Art in Tennessee with another beginning on Saturday in Nashville, Chattanooga Pulse reported.
The exhibit features 10 paintings by Suss, who was inspired by interiors and objects described in Nashville author Ann Patchett’s 2019 novel “The Dutch House”, the plot of which is based in Elkins Park. The novel follows siblings who grew up in an ornate mansion once owned by a wealthy Dutch family. It was named a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, a New York Times bestseller, “A Read with Jenna” Today Show Book Club Pick, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book, and TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of the Year.
“Becky’s paintings … bring memory and interior spaces to life. She’s reading this book and imagining what ‘The Dutch House’ looked like,” Rachel Waldrop, the director and curator of the ICA, said. “She both was pulling out details from the novel … but also pulling things from her own childhood and her own memories.”
Becky Suss (American, b. 1980), The Dutch House (Observatory), 2023, oil on canvas, triptych: 84 x 60 inches (each panel), 84 x 180 inches (overall). © Becky Suss. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Beginning in January 2024, “The Dutch House” gallery was showcased at the ICA for two months before traveling to Naples, Florida, to be displayed in The Baker Museum.
This year, from January 25 to March 16, the gallery will be exhibited at Cheekwood Estate and Gardens in Nashville.
Suss received her MFA from University of California, Berkeley and her BA from Williams College. Her work is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 2020, she was featured by The New Yorker.
More samples of her work:
For more on Becky Suss, you can visit her website.
From the book’s description on Amazon.com:
From Ann Patchett, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth, comes a powerful, richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go. The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are.
At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves.
The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures.
Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.
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Images: Amazon.com, beckysuss.net, icachatt.org