SUSAN DEAN, MOSAIC ARTIST / BUSINESSWOMAN

Susan Dean, mosaic artist and business woman, is an exuberant channeler of life. Her organic life experiences are expressed through the imaginative application of mosaic and the subject matter she selects for her creations. Woven throughout her work are the warp of her past life in “Big Sky Country” Montana and the weft of her current residence in Minnesota, the “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” 

Susan’s story began in Minnesota. She had a “lovely childhood” with her parents and sisters. There was plenty of outdoor and physical activity––hiking, biking, swimming, skiing––and vacations to Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area and western ski resorts. Exposure to the beauty and wildness of nature instilled in Susan a love for the Earth and its creatures. 

Tragically, Susan’s mother died in 1962, leaving her businessman father Don Dean, St. Cloud, Minnesota’s “Dean of Tires,” to raise his independent, free-spirited, and strong-willed daughter. Boarding school exposed Susan to the arts, etiquette, scholastics, and structure. However, Susan was an experiential learner. After completing high school, she graduated from the Ray-Vogue School of Fashion and Interior Design (now part of the Art Institute of Chicago), attempted further college, traveled Europe, and embraced the nomadic counter-culture, eventually, moving to Red Lodge, Montana. There she married and had two sons, finding peace and love at the foot of the Beartooth Mountains.

Her young marriage was short-lived. And Susan moved back to St. Cloud, Minnesota, and the Grand Lake homestead with her boys. In 1985, she bought a marketing business and realized she was good at sales. Nevertheless, by 2000, with her boys grown and her business a quarter-century-old, Susan was restless, ripe for new experiences. Quite by chance, she was introduced to mosaic art. The genre took hold.

Applying herself to this new endeavor and balancing it with her marketing company (Susan is an advocate for “Buy Local.”) the evolving artist took courses at the Chicago Mosaic School, Sharra Frank Gallery & Studio in Minneapolis, and mosaic classes offered locally. She put in hours of discovery, self-study, and trial-and-error creation. Her efforts brought her customers, clients, and grant money from the Central Minnesota Arts Board. Susan’s Mosaics was born.

Susan’s early work consisted of tabletops, planters, and mirrors, done in pique assiette technique with broken glass and ceramics. By 2013, Susan was using tesserae of organic stones, glass, beads, china, fabric, custom-made fused glass, and jewels to transform animal skulls––wildebeest, warthog, blesbok, antelope, deer, and elk. Year-by-year, her skillset grew as she was exposed to new ideas and experimented with new mosaic platforms.

Today, Susan remains fixated on the West as its memories and mysteries affect her very soul and artistic passion. Her most recent focus, begun in 2017, is the North American Bison Skull Series, a reanimation of bison skulls through mosaic application of glass, shell, stone, bone, and metal beads, incorporating self-taught techniques used by Native American bead artists. 

Mosaic artist Susan Dean’s works are available via her website, St. Cloud Art Crawl events, Safari Club International conventions, and appears in a number of Connecticut, Minnesota, and Wisconsin collections. Susan is currently a resident artist at Shadowhawke Garnett’s Buffalo Dance Gallery in Bigfork, Montana, and the Dick Idol Signature Gallery in Whitefish, Montana. She is also available for customized commission projects.