Location: El Cerrito, CA
Medium: Social practice, public art, installation, performance, film, video
Website: susannecockrell.com
Susanne Cockrell is a Bay Area artist and educator based in El Cerrito, California, whose practice spans social practice, public art, installation, performance, film, and video. She holds a BA from Burlington College in Dance/Movement and Transpersonal Psychology, and an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Film, Video, and Performance. Her early training drew from experimental dance and theater, with influences including the Judson Church movement, Eastern medicine, anthropology, and environmental science.
Cockrell joined the faculty of California College of the Arts in 2005, serving over her career as Professor and Chair of Graduate Fine Arts and, earlier, as Chair of the BFA Community Arts program. Her more than 40-year career has centered on participatory and documentary projects that investigate how people inhabit specific places over time — attending to the social, ecological, and historical dimensions of community life. She received a Lucas Artists Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center in 2014, and held residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 1994 and 1995. Her work has been supported by Creative Capital Foundation, the Creative Work Fund (Elise and Walter Haas Foundation), the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Oakland Office of Cultural Affairs, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, among others.
From 2002 to 2017, Cockrell collaborated with Ted Purves under the shared rubric Fieldfaring Projects, producing large-scale social and public art commissions that explored informal economies, urban farming, and questions of collective life at the intersection of urban and rural systems. Their flagship project, Temescal Amity Works (2004–2007), was a two-and-a-half-year social sculpture situated in Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood, facilitating the exchange of backyard fruit, oral histories, and collective biography through a community crop-sharing program and a public reading room. After Purves’s death, Cockrell continued her independent practice, developing new bodies of work including the BL0,0M Project and the ongoing Looking Up series, which attends to sky, light, and seasonal time in the Bay Area landscape.
Cockrell’s practice operates in the register of social practice and public art, typically unfolding over extended periods in real communities and landscapes rather than in gallery settings. Her projects craft what she describes as “intersubjective encounters” that elevate everyday life through symbolic gesture, poetic attention, and the choreography of collective action. Recurring concerns include ecological rhythm, reciprocity between human and non-human communities, the informal economies of neighborhood life, and the persistence of place-based memory.
Her background in experimental dance lends her practice a keen attention to embodiment, timing, and the choreographic quality of shared space. Projects like Temescal Amity Works positioned participants as collaborators, weaving together fruit sharing, oral history, storytelling, and print publication into forms of civic and social art. Her more recent image-based work continues this engagement with landscape and ephemeral encounter, attending to light, sky, and seasonal change as registers of ecological and communal time.
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