The Art and Life of Susan Kleckner

Raw Material: The Art and Life of Susan Kleckner

Following more than four decades since she played a significant role in shaping feminist film and performance, Susan Kleckner is finally receiving the institutional recognition she has long deserved. The exhibition, Raw Material: The Art and Life of Susan Kleckner, currently on display at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery until April 5, 2026, marks the first comprehensive retrospective of this pioneering feminist artist, filmmaker, photographer, and performance artist. With nearly 100 works on display, many of which have never been publicly exhibited before, the exhibition aims to position Kleckner as a foundational figure in feminist, queer, and activist art histories.

Throughout her career spanning from the 1970s onwards, Kleckner engaged with various mediums including film, photography, performance, collage, and installation. She believed that art should not just be a polished commodity but a platform for political urgency, care, and survival. The title of the exhibition, Raw Material, refers to a project that Kleckner was unable to realize in her later years, which aimed to document her experiences of institutionalization and recovery. For Kleckner, the “raw” was not a preparatory stage but the essence of the work itself: embodied, provisional, and unfiltered.

Despite being a central figure in feminist art and film circles, Kleckner’s legacy was often sidelined due to structural inequities and her struggles with mental and physical health. This retrospective has been made possible through years of archival recovery efforts focused on the Susan Kleckner Archives at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The exhibition showcases various highlights from Kleckner’s career, including documentation from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, a 19-year anti-nuclear protest in England; materials from Window Peace (1986), a year-long SoHo storefront performance where over 40 women artists took turns occupying a display window as an act of endurance and visibility; as well as groundbreaking feminist films like Three Lives (1971) and Birth Film (1973).

Expanding beyond the confines of Haverford’s campus, a citywide series in collaboration with Lightbox Film Center and Public Trust aims to revive Kleckner’s durational and public artistic practices. The series includes screenings of her films, a live musical accompaniment to Desert Piece (Outtakes) (1980), and a reimagining of Window Peace that bridges historical recovery with contemporary feminist art practices.

At a time when reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and protest movements are facing renewed threats, Raw Material seeks to emphasize Kleckner’s foresight in asserting that art and politics are inseparable, and that visibility in itself can be an act of resistance.

For more information, visit exhibits.haverford.edu.