“I was one of those kids that always wanted to be an artist,” Susan Lowdermilk, printmaker and book artist, said. “It was something that I was always focused on.” Lowdermilk is a professor of art at Lane Community College where she imparts her knowledge of digital and traditional art forms onto students.
Lowdermilk has had an extensive art career with selected exhibitions featured across the world in museums and cultural spaces, including the Museum of Modern Art, Library of Congress and British Library. She is currently represented by galleries in the Pacific Northwest, Alabama, Colorado and Maryland.
Lowdermilk’s childhood creativity blossomed and she attended Colorado State University as a graphic design student. Seeking out more traditional art forms along with the design classes, Lowdermilk took a printmaking course, which shattered her conception of her artistic interests. “I completely fell in love with it,” Lowdermilk said.
After graduating with an art degree focused in both graphic design and printmaking, Lowdermilk moved back to her hometown of Denver. However, she quickly grew unhappy with the lack of inspiration she found in the community. Lowdermilk decided she needed a change and set her horizons west.
“Wanting to get back on my career pathway, I decided to go back to school,” Lowdermilk said. “So I came to UO in 1988.” This time, Lowdermilk’s focus was printmaking.
“As a graduate student, I was looking for other ways to present my work,” Lowdermilk said. “I took one of the only artist book college classes and thought it was so interesting.” Lowdermilk’s background in graphic design dovetailed into her interest in artist books, which are defined by the Smithsonian Library as “a medium of artistic expression that uses the form or function of ‘book’ as inspiration.”
Lowdermilk has been making artist books ever since, alongside working in the graphic design field and teaching at LCC.
“I think you make art by any means necessary,” Lowdermilk said, borrowing the quote from her friend, Tom Madison, a media arts instructor at Lane Community College. Despite her concentrations being worlds apart, Lowdermilk finds that it makes her art all the more interesting.
2024 marks Lowdermilk’s 27th year of teaching at LCC, where she has taught around 18 different courses ranging from design to drawing to typography. “I’m broad,” Lowdermilk said. “I think I teach the biggest amount of offerings of anybody in our department and that’s because of my background.”
As a professor, Lowdermilk’s biggest advice to students is to try to soak it all in. “You have this great trial run,” Lowdermilk said of the college experience. “You get out in the real world and things get monetized. Really, really try to be present with it.”
The process of making art is a lesson in failure, acceptance and change. “Art teaches you how to fail until you succeed,” Lowdermlik said. “And that’s a life skill. You have to diligently work at something in order to get it to happen.”
Lowdermilk’s latest project is an artist book titled “The Decline of North American Avifauna.” There are six books in the series, all detailing birds that reside and migrate through Oregon. The artist books serve as a commentary on the staggering statistic that since the year 1970 the U.S. has seen a net loss of roughly three billion birds. Lowdermilk explores this crisis in her artist book, which is composed of watercolor birds atop a background of 1970s era U.S. maps that are specific to the bird’s migration.
“The Decline of North American Avifauna” will be featured in the Codex Book Art Fair in Oakland, CA. “Basically I get to be with two hundred or more of my people,” Lowdermilk said. “It’s really fabulous when you’re in a place where you don’t have to explain yourself to anybody.” The fair runs Feb. 4-7 and will host individual artists, nonprofits, centers and organizations that specialize in book arts.
“You’re making things that have never existed on the planet before, and they’re coming from the heart and the mind and your skills and that’s a lot of work,” Lowdermilk said. “You have to follow that journey wherever it takes you, left, right, it’s never straight, in order to come out on the other end with something you never believed you could have done before.”
