Since the late 1980s, Suzanne McClelland has exhibited her work extensively in the United States and abroad. Her practice includes both large-scale paintings and works on paper, often extracting fragments of speech or text from various political and cultural sources and exploring the symbolic and material possibilities that reside within language. Her work has been the subject of solo presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida, and the subject of an exhibition at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art opening, March 5th running through September 2017. Her paintings are held in numerous public collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum; the Yale University Art Gallery, the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. McClelland has twice participated in the Whitney Biennial, in 1993 and 2014, and was included in The New Museum’s exhibition NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star. Awards include Lab Grant Residency at Dieu Donné in New York, Visiting Artist Residency UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, Nancy Graves Grant, American Academy of Arts and Letters, AWAW Award and PS1Clocktower.
Currently, she teaches at the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia University. She has been a faculty member in the Masters of Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts since 1997 and has been a member of the Board of Governors at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture since 1999.