Sue Ravitz grew up a small town girl, in Kalamazoo, MI. For generations, the women in
her family did crafts, but she was never exposed to “fine art.” She continued to do
handwork while raising her family in Chicago. When her kids left home, she began to
explore color more seriously by spending hours every day knitting small blocks of
patterns, spreading them out on the floor, and considering how they related to each
other. During this time, she and Al actively collected art, primarily reductive,
monochrome paintings – all surface and color.

After moving to New York in 2006, Sue began making rugs and thinking about pattern
work, but her focus was still on color interaction. She has exhibited rarely. In 2013 she
had a one person show at Mondo Cane gallery that included three rugs, all the same
pattern and colors, but each utilizing a different technique, with three same-sized paint-
by-numbers of the rugs. In 2016, she was in a group show at Minus Space. Since then,
she has shown her work at Superhouse Gallery and One Wall Gallery. Sue directs the program at 57W57ARTS, and she has curated a couple of book projects,
Painting on Porch and Spectacle Exhibitions.

​

​

Al Ravitz grew up in Detroit in the 60’s. He loves R&B; until 1967 he regularly attended the Motown Review at the Fox theater. He collected all sorts of things from a young age; he says he’s always been strongly affected by the placement of objects in spaces. He eventually became a psychiatrist, but he continued to have an intense response to the environments in which he found himself.

 

Al had been on the faculty at the University of Chicago for 30 years, with a very well-
established career, when Sue, his wife, impulsively decided she wanted to move to NYC.
In 2006, he took a position at the NYU Child Study Center. He says, “I started over;
everything worked out; change is good!” In 2014, Al left academics to start a private
practice; he and Sue opened 57W57ARTS at that time. After collecting art and furniture for over 40 years, which entailed looking at and being with all sorts of aesthetic phenomena, he began painting when the pandemic hit. Given what he does for a living – listening to stories all day – he finds comfort in the assiduously non-narrative, right-brained practice of abstract painting.