Susan Grabel’s latest exhibition at Ceres Gallery in New York confronts two profound ruptures at once: the death of her husband and what she perceives as an assault on American democracy. The show, titled “Lost My Husband/Can’t Lose My Country,” marks a striking evolution in the work of the Staten Island-based artist, who has spent five decades incorporating social commentary into her figurative sculpture and multimedia art.
Following the death of George Rappaport, her husband of fifty-four years, in May 2024, Grabel’s cast paper and molded cardboard portraits have transformed into something piercing. The faces in these new works hide, fragment, protrude, and recede—visual representations of the disorientation that accompanies grief. What began as reflections on identity have become meditations on absence.
Where Private Grief Meets Public Outrage
But Grabel doesn’t isolate her mourning. Instead, she layers it against backdrops constructed from Photoshop collages, protest flyers, and images drawn from public resistance. The result situates personal loss within what she sees as a broader national crisis—a collision of individual heartbreak and collective anxiety about threats to democratic institutions and the Constitution under the current administration.
This fusion of the intimate and the political isn’t new territory for Grabel. Since the 1970s, the Brooklyn-born artist has woven feminist and social issues into her sculptural practice. She was active in the feminist art movement and co-op gallery scene that flourished in Soho during the 1970s and 1980s, when artists were creating alternative exhibition spaces outside the traditional gallery system.
Decades of Social Commentary
Grabel’s artistic education came through Brooklyn College and the Brooklyn Museum Art School in the early 1960s. Her first solo exhibition opened in 1969 at Pace College Gallery in New York City, launching a career that has included shows at galleries and museums nationwide. Her work now resides in both museum and private collections.
The artist continues to exhibit with Ceres Gallery, a space that has long supported women artists addressing political and social themes. Her current exhibition speaks to anyone grappling with how to process personal pain while the world seems to be fracturing around them—a convergence many people have felt but few have articulated so directly.
Grabel has indicated she plans to continue responding to contemporary events through new series of work. For an artist in her eighties who has been making socially engaged art for more than five decades, “Lost My Husband/Can’t Lose My Country” demonstrates that neither age nor grief has dulled her ability—or her determination—to speak to the moment she’s living through.
“Lost My Husband/Can’t Lose My Country” will be on view at Ceres Gallery from March 31st to April 25th, 2026. Visit www.ceresgallery.org for more information.
