Maryland Institute College of Art

Su Zhu Li is a Chinese-born kinetic installation artist based in Houston.

She holds a BFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art with the Toby Devin Lewis Fellowship.

She's exhibited her works at the Staten Island Museum, the Morris Museum, Attleboro Arts Museum, Spring Break Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Flux Factory, Governors Island Art Fair and Public Art Project, the Baltimore Washington International Airport, Chasma Gallery, amongst other venues.

Since 2020, her pandemic-inspired touring project Movement has been well-received at the Alabama Contemporary Arts Center, Missouri State University, the Le Grand Palais in France, the Viborg Kunsthal in Denmark, the Maryland/HoCo Arts Council, and many other venues.

And I ended up getting full tuition, four year scholarships to You're never going to believe this.

RISD, UCLA, Boston University, School of Visual Arts, Maryland Institute.

And there was one other one, and I'll be damned if I can remember it.

And I basically had this buffet of choices.

I found 651 internet exposed PeopleSoft servers.

The first one, government of the District of Columbia, Rhode Island College, Mississippi Department of Information Technology Services, IBM Argentina, Maryland Institute College of Art.

A lot of government, a lot of higher ed here.

Yes.

So I want to shift gears a bit.

We're here at MICA.

We're here in the building.

So I want to shift gears into your solo photography exhibition, A Woman Becomes, opening at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

And then if there's an art gallery next to that one, and there's an art gallery next to that one, I'm like, how does anybody get discovered considering how much there is out there to discover in terms of art?

So I spent this past Friday at Maryland Institute College of Art, MICA.

I have a friend who went there.

His daughter went there.

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

For context, I very briefly met Rue and Max backstage at the Icon 13 conference here in Baltimore at MICA earlier this year.

And we were back to back, didn't really get to interact, but I was so inspired and moved by your talk and your conversation and the way that you work together as a couple and as collaborators.

And I was like, I really want to talk to you on the podcast.

music videos occasionally

illustration for books books what else do we do well

we also what else don't you do we're also teachers I'm a full-time teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design I used to teach at MICA in Baltimore so For that ICON presentation, it was a really nice time to kind of go back to Baltimore and be back at MICA for a bit.

Yeah, it

... a decade now.

Um, I started my grad program, which I went to, I went to MICA, Maryland Institute College of Art, for my graduate program, which was in art education, and I graduated in 2017, and I started really diving into this and splash out into the scene and started doing markets and whatever, and was starting to build my Instagram, and it's just like no one is noticing me, and I was pissed.

[laughs] I was just like, "I know that I'm good.

Why isn't anyone seeing me?" It was very frustrating.

And so that kind of very naturally led me to thinking that creativity was a direction I wanted to go into.

I, with some help, decided to go to the Maryland Institute of Art in Baltimore.

I was very fortunate to take a job with a graphic design shop.

Then I met some people who were in the advertising business, and the idea of creating ads, and especially TV spots, was something that I just thought, "I just have to do that." I just wanted so badly to do that.

But having understanding... intellectual project scholarship as also a creative process of addressing the unknown for me was incredibly liberating and then opened it up for me to be able to use, you know, scholarly research, writing, archival work, you know, as a kind of critical and creative project.

And I think Black Studies is perfect precisely because it's so interdisciplinary and that you find, I was on a panel with And an academic, Rayil Sally, who teaches at MICA, Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art, I think it's called, and the late David Driscoll, art historian, painter.

And it just turned out that not only were we scholars, but we were all makers, right? painters, visual artists, architects, whatever.

And I think it's exactly, you know, that sort of cross-disciplinary murkiness of Black Studies that really can sort of allow for people who think differently and work differently to be able to do their work, to do their Black Studies, to have their critical practice.