Philadelphia-based artist Becky Suss’ inspiration for the works in "The Dutch House" art exhibition was American author Ann Patchett’s 2019 novel of the same name.
“When Suss created her images, in part she was inspired by the descriptions from the novel, but she also conducted her own research and injected little vignettes and little Easter eggs from her own life and her own experiences as well,” Baker Museum of Art Director and Curator Courtney A. McNeil noted. “So what you have is not a literal rendering, like an illustration in a book, but rather an artist’s interpretation that always keeps the viewer aware of the fact that it’s a construction, that this is not a real space you could step into.”
The paintings advance the Baker Museum’s theme for this season, which is storytelling.
“You can tell stories with the visual arts in so many different ways,” said McNeil, “but when this exhibition idea came across my desk, I knew it would be a fantastic fit because we’re not only telling the story of these characters, as interpreted by the painter, Becky Suss, we’re also showing how one type of artist can take a story originated by another artist and add their own layers of interpretation, making the viewer to the exhibition feel like we are yet a third layer of interpretation because we bring our own experiences and perspectives to bear on how we view these works.”
The placards next to each painting identify when the images track the book or are manifestations of the artist’s independent research and interpretation. But they also invite Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks to weigh in as well.
“Another really fun thing that we have are some QR codes that link to clips from the audio book for the novel,” McNeil said. “The audio book was recorded by Tom Hanks, and so it’s a really wonderful feeling to hear his very familiar and warm voice narrating the story.
The exhibition closes January 5.
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In “The Dutch House,” Ann Patchett chronicles two adult siblings, Danny and Maeve, who recall their childhoods and the subsequent dissolution of their family over several decades.
A central character in the novel is their childhood home, the Dutch House.
“Suss plays with perspective, patterning and scale to create flattened compositions that represent how memories are stored in the human mind,” states the Baker Museum’s syllabus for the exhibition. “She considers how the act of painting — through shifting scale, distorting perspective and combining disparate references — mirrors the elasticity of memory, continually reformed and revised.
Suss is intrigued by the way in which people give more credence to their memories than to the idea that we edit and alter them over time.
In a 2024 interview for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, she told journalist Ellen Gerst, “In ‘The Dutch House, there is a conversation between Danny and his sister where he sort of says, 'Do you think we can ever really remember stuff the right way? Like we're adults now, things change so much. We can't really remember the way it was.' And I think that that's true for all of us. But I don't think that the departure is a negative. I think it's interesting, and that's sort of always been a foundation of my work.”
McNeil expanded on this notion.
“The artist is really interested in the process by which we recall our memories and then put them away again,” said McNeil. “She feels like as we recall certain iconic memories from our past again and again over the years, we kind of burnish them every time we take them out, and we highlight some details and we sort of relegate less important details to the side. And so these memories evolve over time and kind of crystallize. We can see this often in siblings talking about shared memories from their childhood, and how these little anecdotes can sometimes evolve to become the canon of your family lore.”
This is why the paintings, while detailed, don’t contain any unnecessary imagery.
“There’s certainly no clutter,” McNeil added. “The details that are there are very intentional.”
While the paintings in the exhibition depict the various rooms in the Dutch House, including Danny and Maeve’s bedrooms, Suss intentionally omitted images of the the siblings, and any other people, from her compositions.
“The people in the gallery get to be the people in the space,” Suss told Gerst. “I like to imagine all the things the walls have witnessed over the decades or centuries."
With a unique ability to render the large-scale intimate, Suss’ paintings visibly bring new life to ‘The Dutch House,’ underscoring the role that contemporary art plays in storytelling.
“I love these paintings,” says McNeil. “They’re incredibly detailed and her ability to do like the Delft tiles, the wood molding, the finishes, the wallpaper are incredible, but at the same time she paints them in a really deliberately flat way so that you know that you can’t walk into this painting.”
Suss also paints in three-quarter scale so that it feels large enough to be really inviting, but the proportions are off just enough that the viewer’s eye has that barrier between the picture plane and themselves.
“The paintings are really fun because the variety of surfaces are really fascinating,” McNeil added. “That could be a class of itself, or a tour through the museum, to look at the crown molding at the top versus the wood grain on the logs in the fireplace.”
“The artist is really interested in reflection and windows and escapes for the eye in one way or another,” McNeil pointed out.
In this way, Suss’ paintings replicate the experience that readers enjoy when they read a novel like “The Dutch House."
Books serve as “mirrors” when the reader sees their own experiences reflected in the narrative and as “windows” when they provide readers a view of experiences that differ from their own.
“This framework could be applied to how the protagonists of Patchett’s novel, siblings Danny and Maeve, related to the Dutch House,” states the label adjacent to the Suss painting titled “The Dutch House (Mirror in Maeve’s Room),” where the viewer looks at a reflection of a reflection of a window.
“When they reflect on their upbringing to better understand their past, the house acts as a mirror,” the label states. “After their stepmother exiles them from the house, it becomes a window for Danny and Maeve, offering them a glimpse into the lives of its remaining inhabitants."
The use of mirrors and windows is also interesting from a visual standpoint.
“It makes you feel uncertain about where you’re standing. It’s hard to get your bearings in a work like this,” McNeil observed.
McNeil contrasts “The Dutch House (Mirror in Maeve’s Room)” with Suss’ rendering of “The Dutch House (Mirror in Danny’s Room),” where the viewer is looking at a mirror reflecting a room.
“But in this case, across from us … or behind us … is a window that gives the eye a little bit of an escape from the confines of the interior the artist has painted us into,” McNeil said.
“Mirror in Danny’s Room” is also one of Suss’ compositions that includes references from the book with images from the artist’s own life.
“The stack of books and box of matches in ‘Mirror in Maeve’s Room’ are Maeve’s belongings, just as the baseball trophies and quilt in ‘Mirror in Danny’s Room’ belong to Danny,” notes the label for the latter painting. “But some details [in the latter painting] come from Suss’ life, such as the Phillies pendant or the pattern of the wallpaper, which is drawn from wallpaper in her childhood friend’s room.”
“It’s a really fun mashup that always leaves you uncertain of where you stand, but intrigued and engaged and wanting to learn more,” McNeil said.
Viewers can enjoy the exhibition even if they haven’t read the book. But many viewers who weren’t previously familiar with “The Dutch House” have subsequently picked up a copy of the novel.
“We’ve heard a lot of that feedback from a lot of people,” said McNeil. “What makes me so happy is hearing that several different people have said that their book clubs read this book a couple of years ago when it came out and have gotten together and come for a tour at the museum of the exhibition based on that, which is great. But in every bit of the interpretation for the show, we worked really hard to make sure that it would be just as rewarding to someone who had never read the book, never heard of the book as it was for somebody who is intimately familiar with it. So we really hope that it functions on both of those levels.”
Suss painted the 10 works in the exhibition in 2023. They debuted at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga in January of 2024. The Baker Museum of Art is the second stop on the exhibition’s tour, which will go to the Cheekwood Museum and Botanical Gardens in Nashville, Tennessee.
“The Dutch House” author, Ann Patchett, is a Tennessee native. According to Becky Suss, Patchett liked the exhibition so much that she purchased one of the paintings.
Becky Suss is renowned for her paintings of detailed scenes that represent the interiority of psychological space and depict the way in which literature serves as a touchstone across her different bodies of work. She refers to her compositions as “book paintings” that act as both a repository for her own identity and values, and as metaphors for upwardly mobile ambitions such as education and intellectualism. When her son was born, Suss began referencing children’s and young adult fiction to protest the marginalization of child-rearing. She used the world of formative literature to elevate domestic spaces, standing in direct response to generations of women in her family who suppressed their artistic and intellectual aspirations to assume traditional homemaking roles.
Courtney A. McNeil is an award-winning curator, art historian and museum leader with nearly two decades of museum and gallery experience. Prior to joining The Baker Museum, she served 15 years in the curatorial department of Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia, where she held the title of chief curator and deputy director for curatorial affairs. At Telfair, she was responsible for overseeing all of the museum’s programmatic activities. Courtney also held positions at Childs Gallery in Boston, where she specialized in American painting and works on paper, and in the publications department of the National Gallery, London.
Courtney has a proven record of championing projects that complicate traditional art historical narratives in order to provide audiences with opportunities for authentic engagement and conversation around the most vital issues of our time. She specializes in aligning the activities of the exhibitions, collections and education teams and implementing data-driven approaches in order to fulfill strategic goals.
She has curated a broad range of exhibitions, including “Spanish Sojourns: Robert Henri and the Spirit of Spain;” “One Hundred Years of Harmony: Paintings by Gari Melchers;” “Kahlil Gibran and the Feminine Divine;” “Mickalene Thomas at Giverny;” “Dan Winters’s America: Icons and Ingenuity;” and “Collecting Impressionism: Telfair’s Modern Vision.” Her exhibitions have been recognized regionally and nationally with awards and grants from organizations including the Southeastern Museums Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Terra Foundation for American Art.
McNeil is active as a lecturer and writer and has served as a judge for numerous exhibitions and art fairs. She has been invited to speak at academic conferences, TEDx Savannah and for various community groups. She has contributed her writing to publications including “Curators’ Choice: Telfair Museums” (Scala Publishers, 2020); “Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection” (University of South Carolina Press, 2018); “Monet and American Impressionism” (University Press of Florida, 2015); “Dan Winters’s America: Icons and Ingenuity” (Telfair Museums, 2012), “Georgia Masterpieces: Selected Works from Georgia’s Museums” (Georgia Council for the Arts, 2009) and “Dutch Utopia: American Artists in Holland, 1880-1914” (Telfair Museums, 2009).
Courtney is a native of Boston and holds a B.A. in English with a minor in art history from Georgetown University and an M.A. in the history of art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, where she authored her dissertation on John Singleton Copley’s monumental painting “The Siege of Gibraltar.” She also earned an executive certificate in nonprofit leadership and management from the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.