Biography of Suzanne Osterweil Weber

Suzanne Osterweil Weber is an important contemporary painter who has had dual careers as an accomplished art educator with many awards and honors, all while working as an artist. She was a pioneer of Manhattan’s SoHo Artist-in-Residence loft movement, having lived there in the ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s, before moving to NJ. She is an experienced exhibitor on the New York City art scene with almost 20 solo exhibitions under her belt, and she has participated in hundreds of group shows. Best known for her large-scale, colorful, photorealistic style with a surreal edge, Suzanne Weber’s work hangs in numerous public and notable private collections.

With much fanfare in art collecting recently trending toward female artists who were perhaps not fully represented or recognized during their lifetimes, experts have compared Suzanne Weber to other well-collected women artists like Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), Vivian Springford (1913-2003) and Lynne Drexler (1928-1999) – all American abstract expressionist painters who were important contributors to the art world in the mid to late 20th century New York Art scene.

Born in Brooklyn on June 22,1940, Suzanne Weber is a true Cancerian and moon child in that she is emotionally sensitive and intuitive, nurturing and caring, warm and kind, and obviously wildly creative. She went to (and later taught at) James Madison High School in Brooklyn, class of '57, along with Ruth Bader Ginsberg '50, Chuck Schumer '67 and Bernie Sanders '59, among other distinguished alumni. She was inducted into their Wall of Distinction in 2022. She received an undergrad scholarship to Pratt Institute where she received her BS degree in Art Education in 1961. She received her graduate degree from Pratt in 1964 in Art Education and second graduate degree from Pace University in 1975 in Educational Administration/Supervision. She was a high school art teacher at several prestigious art institutions where she taught painting, drawing and design -- Brooklyn Museum, Parsons, James Madison High School (for 16 yrs), High School of Art & Design NYC, and she was Assistant Principal of Vocational Art there from 1979-1990 where she supervised over 60 art teachers. She was later Principal at Port Richmond HS in Staten Island. She retired from her last job in education in 1997 when she was the Principal of Monmouth Regional High School in Tinton Falls. “I left because I wanted to paint full time. I had been teaching since my sophomore year in college. I just want to paint and read and think. Any day that I can paint is a good day.”

Now she works out of a room with a large window in her beautiful home overlooking her backyard pool in Ocean, NJ, where she lives with her husband Michael of over 40 years, and they have one son, a granddaughter and a new born grandson.

Suzanne Weber has developed a few different styles of painting throughout her long career, with most of her work in large format acrylics on canvas.

In her early career she painted and showed realistic figures/portraits from photos, which she refers to as “Photorealist / American Life”, where her larger-than-life subjects are caught frozen in an activity, and always with a story to tell. Her portraits are identifiable with their high contrast between light and dark, and a bold, stylistic play of patterns and blocks of warm and cool saturated colors, some with mini abstract expressionist vignettes within the elements. This style of her work has been recently compared to Eric Fischl, a wildly successful internationally acclaimed artist currently living on the East End of Long Island, known for his paintings depicting American suburbia from the 1970s and 80s.

In the 2000s, while living in Monmouth County, her work reached a new audience and she became known as a modern portrait painter. It was at a 2005 event for the American Cancer Society annual ball, where she displayed a portrait she had created years earlier from a photo in Life Magazine of the family of the late Stavros Spyros Niarchos, the Greek shipping tycoon, at their Villa in the Aegean. She thought the spectacular piece was simply going to market her talent for a portrait sitting which she was donating to the event, but the publicity reached one of the four Niarchos children featured in the painting. Not only did he buy it but he bought a second work and also commissioned another portrait of his own children. Publicity from this interaction with the Niarchos Family garnered much attention on her talent and her work. and she continued to donate her portrait sittings to charities all over Monmouth County. As a result, portraits by Suzanne Weber have raised many thousands of dollars for charitable organizations.

Her symbolic photo montage paintings, which she refers to as “Photorealist / Surreal”, are quirky fantasy-like paintings that do not include people unless they are sculpted statues. Full of enigmatic imagery of flowers, animals, fish, birds, shells, she lays her selected materials out on the floor and builds the collage and then transfers the design to her canvas. Contrasts between color and content abound, and form a vocabulary of images. She has said about these paintings that she tries to create a private world where the viewer has a couple of choices: either ponder the images until they yield meaning, or simply bask in the beauty and color, which is considerable.

She also has done many bold geometric and still life pieces that always seem to delight and bewilder with their discipline and order.

Her work is influenced by her favorite artists--Vermeer, Hopper, Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso and Mondrian, Hockney, Stella and Warhol.

Notable Shows/Galleries/Museums:

The Brooklyn Museum	The Queens Museum	Dyansen Gallery NYC
Pleiades Gallery NYC	National Arts Club NYC	Ta-Nisia Gallery NYC
Marymount Manhattan College	Wagner College	Pratt Institute, 25 yr Retrospective
US information Agency	Monmouth Medical Center	Niarchos Family Villa in Aegean
National Art Museum of Sport (now Children's Museum of Indianapolis)	Owl Gallery, Woodmere, NY	West Broadway Gallery NYC