Susan Kliewer Bio
Susan Kliewer, a native of Southern California, has made Arizona her home for 35
years. She spent five of those years at the Marble Canyon Trading Post in a remote
area of Northern Arizona, adjacent to the Navajo Reservation.
A painter since the age of ten, Susan turned to sculpting in 1987, after working in an art casting foundry for ten years.
In 1993 Susan won a competition to create a monument of Sedona Schnebly. A ten-foot
high sculpture of her town’s namesake was installed in front of the Sedona City
Library. Since then many more monuments have followed. Some have gone to Europe
and many are installed in this country, as far away as Miami Beach.
Susan often uses her Native American friends and relatives as models to capture the special intimacy which is a hallmark of her work. Her depiction of cowboys and
Indians in everyday life, from the past as well as the present are, as
one critic
said, “Truly heartfelt”.
“My work”, she says, “aims to show the common thread that underlies all human experience,
and which, I hope, brings us to a greater understanding between all peoples”.