After a 36 year career as a professor at Xavier University, printmaking artist Suzanne Chouteau is retiring.
An enrolled member of the Shawnee Tribe, she says a common through line of her work is her love and care for all things living and nonliving.
An exhibition celebrating Chouteau’s work, called “In Perspective,” will be open until Friday, Sept. 20 at Xavier’s A.B. Cohen Center.
WYSO’s Indigenous Affairs reporter Adriana Martinez-Smiley spoke with Chouteau.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Adriana Martinez-Smiley: My first question is if you could discuss what first inspired you to pursue art?
Suzanne Chouteau: So I was raised in a family of artists. Particularly, my father was a professor of art at Saint Ambrose University. And so from a very early age, I was given drawing utensils and to start making pictures at a very young age.
I'm the youngest of eight children, and all of the children above me all helped in that art education because they all were creative and being the youngest, it seemed like they enjoyed having me learn from them as well.
Martinez-Smiley: I was looking up some of your artwork and I noticed that you focus on printmaking. So I was wondering if you could just discuss – why printmaking? Why is that the format that you turn to?
Chouteau: My exposure to printmaking was very early on, but as a child we had beautiful prints hanging up on our walls – woodcuts, etchings, engravings. And these were prints done by colleagues of my father, but also by my dad as well. And then as I went through K-12 education, printmaking kept coming into my curriculum and I just loved it.
When I went to college to study at Saint Ambrose University with my father and the other professors there, I took printmaking. And so I learned etching and lithography, screen printing, all of these mediums. And also my father incorporated in his pictorial design classes, emboss and calligraphy and so forth. So my undergrad gave me a wide range of printmaking experience.
The process was so deep and creative and complex, and I think maybe I also can see backwards a little bit. In other words, I can see how I can work from the backwards image to the way it's going to print and so forth. I guess all of those things conspired to make me passionate about printmaking.
Martinez-Smiley: So you've obviously been pursuing art and printmaking for a long time. But something that I saw is sort of new in your life is the fact that you, as an adult, became enrolled in the Shawnee Tribe. And that heritage is something that you've also had the opportunity to explore in your artwork. I'm wondering if you can discuss why this part of your identity has been hard to access up to this point?
Chouteau: My great great grandmothers Caroline Suggett and Nancy Francis were born here in Ohio, respectively, 1831 and 1832.
Caroline, she was born in something like an internment camp, somewhere outside of Dayton. Ultimately, both of them made the long forced removal journey sometime in the 1830s to Kansas.
And then Caroline was put in the Shawnee Mission School. Clearly, speaking her language, practicing the customs that her mother must have tried to give to her as a young child — that wasn't going to be acceptable. I imagine similarly, Nancy Francis also had challenges growing into Shawnee autonomy.
One major reason is that the Shawnee were lumped with the Cherokee. And so up until the year 2000, I was a member of the Cherokee Shawnee Tribe. It was only in 2000 that the Shawnee were finally recognized as an independent, autonomous tribal nation. And so that's why it's taken a long time because of all the struggle of my great, great grandmothers, my great grandfathers.
We don't have enough time to go into even greater depth, but I think that gives you an idea of why it's been so hard for my family to–stay Shawnee, let's put it that way. So that's why I'm making these pictures because I don't want those stories completely lost. Because in essence, after I pass, my Shawnee bloodline may not be carried on. And so in some ways, making art, making something visual and physical, making an artifact is a way of trying to let that live on beyond you.
Martinez-Smiley: Yeah, absolutely. What do you think– or maybe what do you hope you are leaving in your wake as you are exiting your position at Xavier?
Chouteau: I've had an amazing privilege of teaching incredibly great people. I've had great students and they've gone on to be great citizens of their communities and they have deep and caring hearts. But really, I hope I've instilled in all the students I've taught for 36 years a deep appreciation for art making and what art brings to their lives. It is such a beautiful aspect of human being, being a human right. Art, making creations – that really is such a positive force. It can be. And that's what I've emphasized, that we can be positive forces for good in this world. And let's use our arts and our knowledge of art to be good citizens.
