Sue Friesz is a visual artist working in painting, drawing, and sculpture. Sue uses shapes, contours, and patterns found in the plant world as well as the built world, putting them together in some degree of balance. Sometimes this balance falls nearer the organic side of the spectrum and other times it is closer to the mechanical end. It can also be a perfect balance of both but never one without the other.
Sue’s work has been in solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. In Kansas City at the University of Missouri Gallery of Art, Urban Culture Project Space, Paragraph Gallery, Kansas City Flatfiles Invitational H&R Block Artspace, Gladys Woods Kemper Art Center, Sioux City Art Center, Samson Projects in Boston, Massachusetts, Exposição de Artes in the Tribunal de Justiça, Centro Civico, Curitiba, Brazil, New American Paintings Exhibition in Print, Boston. Her work is in corporate and private collections including the Sprint Corporation.
Sue has won grants from the Avenue of the Arts Foundation and Public Arts Commission grant, Kansas City. She received an Artist Inc. Professional Development Workshop Grant, participated in the artist lecture series at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. She took part in the Art Through Architecture Program, a partnership of Charlotte Street Foundation and the AIA, and received a fellowship from the Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Fund.
Sue holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Missouri Kansas City and a Master of Arts from the University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg. She is a member of the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society. She and her husband spent part of the 1990’s living in Asuncion, Paraguay; Curitiba, Brazil; and Beni Suef, Egypt. They moved to Portland in 2012 where Sue maintains a working studio in Northwest near the Pearl District.