The Art and Life Journey of Susan Kleckner: A Focus on Raw Material
More than four decades after she helped shape feminist film and performance, Susan Kleckner is finally receiving the institutional recognition she was long denied. “Raw Material: The Art and Life of Susan Kleckner,” on view at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery through April 5, 2026, is the first comprehensive retrospective of the pioneering feminist artist, filmmaker, photographer, and performance artist. Bringing together nearly 100 works, many never before publicly exhibited, the exhibition seeks to reposition Kleckner as a foundational figure in feminist, queer, and activist art histories.
Active from the 1970s onward, Kleckner worked across film, photography, performance, collage, and installation, insisting that art function not as a polished commodity but as a site of political urgency, care, and survival. The exhibition’s title references an unrealized late-life project documenting her experiences of institutionalization and recovery. For Kleckner, the “raw” was not preparatory — it was the work itself: embodied, provisional, and unfiltered.
Despite her centrality to feminist art and film circles, Kleckner’s legacy was marginalized by structural inequities and compounded by mental and physical illness. This retrospective emerges from years of archival recovery centered on the Susan Kleckner Archives at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Highlights include the documentation of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, the 19-year anti-nuclear protest in England; materials from “Window Peace” (1986), her year-long SoHo storefront performance in which over 40 women artists sequentially occupied a display window as an act of endurance and visibility; and landmark feminist films including “Three Lives” (1971), the first feature-length documentary produced by an all-women crew, and “Birth Film” (1973), one of the earliest feminist films to document childbirth.
Extending beyond Haverford’s campus just outside Philadelphia, a citywide series in partnership with Lightbox Film Center and Public Trust reactivates Kleckner’s durational and public practices. Programs include screenings of her films, a live musical accompaniment to “Desert Piece (Outtakes)” (1980), and a reimagining of “Window Peace” that bridges historical recovery and contemporary feminist practice.
At a moment when reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and protest movements are again under threat, “Raw Material” intends to underscore Kleckner’s prescient insistence that art is inseparable from political life — and that visibility itself can be an act of resistance.
To learn more, visit [exhibits.haverford.edu](https://bit.ly/4tBFZBQ?ref=hyperallergic.com).