2025
Susie Monday
"Milagros" by Susie Monday
Susie Monday
Creating a world out of fabric
Give Susie Monday a piece of cloth and she'll dye it, print it, cut it up, and turn it into a story. SAALM's 2025 Artist of the Year makes art quilts that read like the Hill Country itself — sun-bleached, layered, a little wild at the edges.
Her Art
Monday doesn't buy fabric so much as make it. She dyes it, screen-prints it, draws on it with an iPad, then slices it up and collages it back together, raw edges and all — closer to painting with cloth than to quilting as you probably picture it. Nothing is off-limits as raw material: a thrift-store skirt, a Guatemalan huipil, a baby's old onesie, somebody's cast-off silk scarf. "Nothing is sacred," she says, "and everything is."
What holds it all together is color, pattern, and a fondness for words — she can't resist a found letter, a scrap of text, a hand-lettered phrase, and they turn up in her work openly or in disguise. Some pieces tell stories outright: goddesses, saints, altar-shaped compositions built from the quiet dramas of everyday life. Others are pure abstraction, chasing the colors and textures right outside her studio door — agave, ocotillo, cedar, the wind doing something interesting to the light.
Susie Monday working on a project in her studio.
Her Background
Monday was making things before she could remember not making things — sandboxes, cookie dough sculptures, doll clothes stitched together at the kitchen table. The turning point came at nine, when a great-aunt mailed her a real artist's box, brushes and all. That was it. Identity solved.
It took a few decades to circle back to it full-time, though. In between, she was a newspaper reporter, a children's museum director, a curriculum designer — a whole string of jobs that all happened to need somebody creative. At 50, she decided enough was enough and made art her actual job. She studied under Jane Dunnewold (a past SAALM Artist of the Year herself) and learned to fuse and collage cloth from Sue Benner, then spent the years since teaching everywhere from the Houston International Quilt Festival to guild meetings across the country, out of her studio, El Cielo, in Pipe Creek.
the aoy program
Each year, the San Antonio Art League + Museum honors one exceptional artist with its prestigious Artist of the Year award. Open to artists throughout the region, the rigorous selection process spans several months. A member committee narrows nominees to three finalists, and an unbiased panel of out-of-state jurors selects the winner.
Announced each December at the Art League's Christmas party, the honoree receives a three-month solo exhibition and catalog the following year.
