Susan Martin is Founding Director of Some Serious Business and Creative Consultant for Howl! Arts (NYC). Internationally recognized for her innovative collaborations with groundbreaking cultural creators, curators, and organizations, since beginning her arts career in 70s Los Angeles, Martin has worked with prestigious galleries and museums, performance venues, and cutting-edge artists including Laurie Anderson, Beck and Al Hansen, Lynda Benglis, Charles Brittin, Rhys Chatham, Lucinda Childs, Guy de Cointet, Marcel Dzama, Karen Finley, Diamanda Galás, Mike Gira and Swans, Philip Glass & Ensemble, Jenny Holzer, Louise Lawler, Liza Lou, Lydia Lunch, Linda Mary Montano, Meredith Monk, Herman Nitsch, Nam June Paik, Izhar Patkin, Rachel Rosenthal, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, and Robert Wilson.
Martin established her public relations firm in early 80s New York, working with vanguard artists, musicians, galleries, and nightclubs like Danceteria and the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge. She was also PR counsel to Dr. Mathilde Krim at the AIDS Medical Foundation and the architect of Art Against AIDS, a national fundraising effort with Elizabeth Taylor as National Chair for the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). During this period she also managed cutting-edge artist Lydia Lunch and founded Labor Records and produced the first EP by Swans with Michael Gira, as well as other eclectic and experimental music.
In the 90s in Los Angeles, Martin curated exhibitions for Track 16 Gallery and was managing editor of their Smart Art Press, publisher of books and catalogs on art and social history. She was responsible for the publication of more than 50 books, catalogs and monographs by artists such as Karen Finley, Rachel Rosenthal, Chris Kraus and Semiotext(e), Jim Shaw, Pierre Molinier, and Charles Brittin, as well as the first catalog to feature the work of Marcel Dzama. She also edited the Public Offerings and The Experimental Exercise of Freedom catalogs for the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA/LA).
During her career, Martin was marketing consultant to the Centre Pompidou Foundation, and led marketing projects for organizations including the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts); The Kitchen; La MaMa; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Metro Creative Services/Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority; Otis College of Art and Design; the Santa Monica Museum of Art; SITE Santa Fe; Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc); and The Wooster Group.
In 2015, Martin re-launched Some Serious Business an innovative artist-based nonprofit organization she co-founded in 1976 in LA, known for presenting cutting-edge artists, creators, and thought-leaders. She is also the Creative Consultant for Howl! Arts in New York City and has produced numerous events and co-curated and edited the catalogs for Lydia Lunch’s exhibition So Real It Hurts (2015) and Love Among the Ruins (2017) for which she wrote the introduction.
She is co-author with the late Brian Butterick and Kestutis Nakas of an oral history of the early days of the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge for which she was the publicist entitled “We Started a Nightclub”: The Birth of the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge as Told By Those Who Lived it.
She lives on a mesa in Abiquiu, New Mexico where she manages Some Serious Business’s artist in residence program, SSB Away, and continues to produce salons, concerts, exhibitions, and other cultural initiatives locally and in Los Angeles and New York. susan@someseriousbusiness.org / 310 975 9970