Susan Sollins, a Creator of PBS’s ‘Art21’ Series, Dies at 75
Susan Sollins, an art curator who took avant-garde exhibitions to small communities across the country and produced an award-winning PBS television series aimed at demystifying and popularizing contemporary art, died on Oct. 13 at her home in Rye, N.Y. She was 75.
Ms. Sollins first came to public attention in the 1970s as a founder of Independent Curators Incorporated, a small nonprofit organization that produced traveling art exhibitions — “a museum without walls,” as she called it — featuring both renowned and emerging contemporary artists.
She and her co-founder, Nina Castelli Sundell, who died in August, curated or coordinated hundreds of exhibitions over the next two decades, introducing new ideas and revisiting old ones — Pop Art, Conceptualism, Deconstructivism — for audiences in small cities and university towns throughout the Western Hemisphere and Europe.
The project for which Ms. Sollins is best known is “Art21,” or “Art in the Twenty-First Century,” a four-part series about contemporary art and artists that PBS generally broadcasts every two years. Now in its seventh season, “Art21” presents artists discussing themselves and their work in an unmediated way. Ms. Sollins conducted the interviews from behind the camera but was never heard in the finished documentaries.
She and a partner, Susan Dowling-Griffiths, began working on the project in 1997. It was first broadcast in September 2001.