The Darkly Whimsical World of Suzanne Adan

Cabin Number Seven (2013) by Suzanne Adan. Collection of Marcy Friedman, courtesy of the Crocker Art Museum

TThink of Suzanne Adan as the City of Sacramento’s unofficial greeter: If you arrive via Sacramento International Airport’s Terminal B, it’s hard to cross the threshold without catching a contagious smile as you pull your roller bag across the artist’s sparkly, whimsical floor mosaic, Flying Colors. It’s the first thing you see when you step off the people mover and into the lobby, even before you spy the famous red hare hanging in the atrium. Pictures don’t do justice to the way the polished inlay shimmers underfoot, a topsy-turvy dreamscape of branches, floating feathers and birdhouses on stilts. Black round-eyed birds—some with freshly caught worms in their beaks—seem to have either just touched down or are about to take flight, much like the travelers.

Tens of thousands of people experience Adan’s airport art every day, and it would be hard to think of a better brand ambassador for the region. The artist—who turned 80 in February—grew up in Yolo County’s farmland as part of the postwar Baby Boom, came of age in the Vietnam era as an outspoken college student, and helped generations of Sacramento creatives find their footing as an educator and gallerist, all while steadily producing a vibrant body of work with a surrealist kick and a sly sense of humor. This summer, that oeuvre will be on prominent display at the Crocker Art Museum, which is producing the artist’s first solo museum retrospective—along with a definitive, 180-page exhibit catalog—titled Suzanne Adan: I’m No Spring Chicken.

“I hate to paint!” Suzanne Adan cries over a bowl of pan-seared beef and rice noodles at chef-owner Mai Pham’s Lemon Grass Restaurant in Arden-Arcade in March. Sitting next to Adan, her sculptor husband, Michael Stevens, barks out a surprised laugh as Adan nods and reiterates, “I hate  to paint.”

What Adan means is that the meticulous painting style she has developed over the years makes executing the work downright tedious. “I need a psychiatrist to tell me, ‘What the heck were you thinking?’ ” she jokes.

Adan’s Flying Colors was installed in 2011 as part of the then-new Terminal B at the Sacramento International Airport. (Photo by Jeremy Sykes)

From a distance, Adan’s large canvases appear loose and free, but step up close and you see that they are composed of elongated individual brushstrokes, precisely arranged like interlocking puzzle pieces or needlepoint stitches. Adan traces the origin of this style to an aha moment she had in 1977 on a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, looking at the brushstrokes in Vincent van Gogh’s 1887 self-portrait. Here this Impressionist master’s brushwork is tightly uniform, a stylistic phase en route to sunflowers and starry nights, as Van Gogh absorbed the shock to his visual system caused by first seeing George Seurat’s pointillism the year before—just as he was shocking Adan’s system now.

“It had a light that was so beautiful,” Adan recalls. “I went down to the bookstore, bought the postcard, came home and started experimenting with how to layer paint.” Her output as a painter has always been leavened with an irrepressible and eclectic mix of drawings, ceramics, mosaics and assemblages too. “What I enjoy doing are the mixed-media drawings,” she says brightly. “It’s a fun thing.” Collages like The Magic Chef (In Memory of James Adan), a portrait of her late brother who passed in 2021, with a vintage stove cut from a magazine ad for a body, surrounded by their grandmother’s recipes, copied out in writing so small it looks like a lace border. And yet, Adan is primarily a painter, so paint she must.

The Crocker show, which begins June 28 and runs through Oct. 11, will boast more than 100 works from Adan’s extensive career, including one very new painting—if she can finish it. Adan is working on a 5-foot-tall canvas (i.e., almost her height) in time for the exhibit’s opening. That’s the reason she can’t let anyone into her studio space just now, so we’re meeting at the couple’s favorite neighborhood restaurant instead. (Adan and Stevens live in the same Arden-Arcade home they bought in 1975.) “I do have issues,” she says. “If you let somebody in your studio, they’re going to make a comment that’ll stick in your head.” Even an offhand remark, she insists, could jinx the whole thing. She doesn’t even want her husband to see her working on the painting—which is a challenge, since her studio is in a corner of their bedroom.

Adan’s large canvases typically take her months to complete, but this piece, Home Cooking Too, has been in the works for years. She began it in 2013 but put it away that same year to help care for her ailing mother, who died in 2014 and to whom this freshly painted family portrait is dedicated. According to her assiduously kept painting diary, she pulled it back out once, briefly, in 2016. “But I have no memory of that,” she marvels, then leans in and drops to a conspiratorial whisper. “So last week when Mike had a dental appointment, I thought, ‘I’m going to go in there when he’s not around,’ so if I screw up, I don’t have to have him look at it and say, ‘Oh, God. Suzanne, you are in real trouble.’ ”

Stevens arches a brow. “I had no idea,” he says, amused. 

“So I get into the studio, and I’m painting like a chimpanzee! I couldn’t get a straight edge.” She shakes her head, then sighs. “Yesterday I went in for the second time, and it was much better. I thought, ‘OK, I can get this rhythm back.’ ”

The 2006 mixed-media work Black-Eyed Susan (In Memory of Reilly and Murphy) depicts Adan (left) and her artist husband, Michael Stevens, holding avatars of the couple’s late, beloved dogs. (Artwork by Suzanne Adan, collection of Rita Gibson, courtesy of the Crocker Art Museum)

Adan is the kind of mischief-maker who would hold rabbit-ear fingers over your head in snapshots—there’s even a picture of her in the new exhibit catalog where she’s making rabbit ears over her own head. And in her artist photo on her website, both she and the terrier in her lap are wearing Groucho Marx glasses, complete with noses and mustaches. She plucked the Crocker show’s title I’m No Spring Chicken from a similar line Aunt Bee delivered in a 1963 episode of The Andy Griffith Show, a longtime favorite of Adan and Stevens. But what makes it funny is that Adan kind of is a spring chicken. At 80, her energy is so organically youthful that you could easily mistake her for Jamie Lee Curtis playing a body-swapped teenager in Freaky Friday.

Adan and Stevens have been married more than five decades. They met cute when they were assigned the same locker in an art class at Sacramento State in 1966, and have been collaborating as curators, teachers and sometimes as artists ever since, while their parallel solo careers have marched forward like a pair of train tracks.

Sixty years of life in the arts have led the couple to amass an impressive cachet of dinner party anecdotes, like the one about their lunch with Andy Warhol at the Factory, on their one and only trip to New York City in 1978. An Adan family friend, Jed Johnson—a star interior designer whose clients included Mick Jagger and Barbra Streisand (Architectural Digest  called him one of the 20 greatest designers of all time)—was Warhol’s longtime romantic partner and collaborator. So when Adan and Stevens traveled to Manhattan for one of Stevens’ solo shows, Johnson sent a limo to pick them up for lunch at the Factory, where they entered a room adorned with screen-print portraits of Liza Minnelli and Muhammad Ali. “It was pretty exciting to see these huge portraits. I was in awe of the whole thing,” Adan says. “It was the highlight of the trip.” As for the visionary behind the Factory, she remembers, “Andy didn’t have a lot to say, but he was personable. He talked very softly—he was not a dynamic person like you’d expect.” The group sat down to lunch at a long dining table, with Warhol at one end and a recent holographic portrait of the artist at the other. “So there were two Andys,” Stevens says.

Meeting up with Scott A. Shields, the Crocker’s chief curator, the next day at the museum for a preview of a few works to be included in the show, Adan breezes in bearing an assortment of artful pastries from Estelle Bakery & Pâtisserie that she directs Shields to cut up and distribute, and which he does with the demeanor of a helpful nephew. 

Shields has brought Adan’s childhood scrapbook to return to her, having pulled images from it for the catalog, including one clipping from Woodland’s Daily Democrat  from 1965, a teenage Adan beaming from the front page as Yolo County’s top 4-H Club All-Star for her prodigious output in the rural arts of food preservation, animal husbandry and the like.

One of the works from the Crocker’s collection that we’re here to preview, Pigtails: Go to the Head of the Class, is a 2013–15 multimedia work that’s a painted assemblage based on a child’s chalkboard easel. Adan has painted a self-portrait on the chalkboard, in her 4-H costume, semi-abstract corkscrew curls flying from her head—and another sprouting where her nose should be, as if her girlish innocence itself is one of Pinocchio’s lies. Those Pinocchio noses, in various guises, are a common theme in Adan’s work; sometimes they are twigs, sometimes they have snakes or ladders hanging from them, and at least one is a penis.

Pigtails: Go to the Head of the Class (2013–2015) incorporates toys from Adan’s extensive collection, including pieces from the classic board game Go to the Head of the Class. (Artwork by Suzanne Adan, courtesy of the Crocker Art Museum, gift of Emily Leff)

Another work in the Crocker’s permanent collection is a 1993 painting called Flying Saucers; a stick-figure skeleton with a clown nose, a teacup-and-saucer hat and a black death mask with Xs for eyes, sharing the canvas with a cartoonishly animated black burial urn (think the teapot from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast). These figures seem to inhabit the eye of a tornado, surrounded by flying symbols, sticks, squiggles and objects (a teapot, a hat, a house). Carl Jung could have had a field day parsing the symbolism.

But Adan happily shrugs off interpreting her imagery, preferring to let the subconscious stay burbling below the surface. She likens her use of repetitive symbols to musical notes. “I think if my family had been wealthy [her dad, Raymond, was a truck driver and mom, Myrtle, was a homemaker] and I’d had private lessons, I probably would have done something musical with my life,” she says. “My music background comes in with the rhythmic dashes, squares, polka dots. Music has helped me envision how I do my intuitive work.”

Flying saucers, which also resemble eyes, appear in two more pieces that will be in the show, both owned by the collector Marcy Friedman, who co-sponsored the exhibit and the catalog. (Other Adan aficionados have included the late Sacramento Mayor Phil Isenberg and Tower Records founder Russ Solomon.) Polka Dots  depicts a Pinocchio-nosed figure with a dog in one hand and a lit match in the other, while Cabin Number Seven  is a deconstruction of Adan and Stevens’ annual vacations to the Sardine Lake Resort in the Tahoe National Forest, with dots, fish bones, a boat and a hobby horse, among other elements. The Friedman family owns Arden Fair mall and have been major patrons of the arts. Their son Mark, the developer who helmed the design and construction of Golden 1 Center, is also an enthusiastic collector of both Adan and Stevens.

When I call Marcy Friedman a few months before the Crocker exhibit, she’s looking at Cabin Number Seven  as we speak (it is still in her Carmichael dining room and hasn’t yet been packed up for its trip to the museum). “I know of no one else who paints like Suzanne,” says Friedman, an accomplished painter herself. “It is meticulous. It’s intentional. It’s like needlepoint. And yet it’s full of wild symbolism. It’s in constant motion, but there are points at which she allows you to rest your eye. Every time you look at it, you see something new.”

Shields agrees. “No other artist makes art that looks like hers. It’s fastidious, it’s dark, it’s obsessive, it’s funny, it’s surreal. She does something that really is uniquely hers,” he says. “[Her pieces] look fun—and they are—but there’s a lot going on. I secretly hope that when my colleagues at museums and other places see [the catalog], they’re going to be like, ‘Wow, who is this artist? She’s incredible. How do I get one of her paintings?’ ”

The syncopated impasto brushstrokes on 1987’s Even Steven “increase the scene’s visual tension—a tension like vibrations along a taut piano wire,” writes Diana L. Daniels, a former Crocker curator, in the catalog for Adan’s new retrospective at the museum. (Artwork by Suzanne Adan, collection of Michael Stevens, courtesy of the Crocker Art Museum)

Adan was born in Yolo County’s rural heartland and grew up in the town of Yolo, population 300. As a country girl, Adan busied herself with 4-H and Girl Scouts simply because there was “absolutely nothing to do” in Yolo. She learned sewing, cooking, canning and even raised a pig. In school she joined the band but only ever took one basic arts and crafts class, in which she made a bobby pin holder for her mother (the artist’s mind was already present as she used bobby pins to carve it).

She graduated high school in 1963 and enrolled that fall at Sacramento State, where her parents wanted her to study a practical subject like teaching or nursing. But that was the year Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique  hit the best-seller lists. Female empowerment and the upending of gender roles were on every student’s mind, including Adan’s. And when she enrolled in a basic design class in 1964, something sparked. Her brother James, who became a fellow artist, noticed her talent right away. “My brother said, ‘You have intuitive qualities, you don’t do this realistic stuff . I think you need to take a class from Irving Marcus. He is a really interesting teacher.’ ” So in the spring of 1965 she enrolled in Marcus’ beginner’s oil painting class. “That changed everything for me,” she says of the influential painter whose colorful figurative work deftly combines cheerful elements of whimsy with undertones of menace, and is in the permanent collections of major museums like the Crocker and the de Young. “He became my mentor and that’s when I knew I wanted to be an art major.”

A lot of things happened very fast for Adan’s budding art career. First, she had a drawing accepted into an open art exhibition at the Crocker later that year when she was still just 19. “I thought it was the biggest deal ever, that my career was zooming,” she says, laughing. “The only time I’d been to the Crocker was on an eighth-grade field trip.” Then in 1966, Adan’s painting Self Portrait in a 1920s Setting  and a ceramic jewelry box won her the title of best in show at the Yolo County Fair and she had her first solo show at Sierra College in Rocklin. And she earned back-to-back degrees, a bachelor’s in 1969 and a master’s in 1971, both in art.

The artist Gladys Nilsson, wife of then-Sacramento State professor Jim Nutt, distinctly remembers seeing one of Adan’s graduate school works, titled Panty Hose, a collage in which Adan spliced together an early advertisement for pantyhose—which first hit shelves in 1959—and a pair of panties arranged with a garden hose approaching them in a decidedly phallic fashion. “When I saw it, I just started laughing uproariously,” Nilsson says on a call from her home just outside Chicago. “It was so simple and so direct and so damn funny and so enjoyable, and her work has been like that for me ever since.” She and Adan would go on to become lifelong friends. In 1976, they had a joint show at Folsom’s influential Candy Store Gallery, the announcement for which is a sketchy line drawing showing Nilsson as a cat, and Adan as a dog, both wearing sweaters appliqued with their first initials, Laverne & Shirley  style. Now, exactly 50 years later, the friends are set to have overlapping solo shows at the Crocker. Nilsson’s own retrospective titled Gleefully Askew  will open July 19, three weeks after Adan’s, and the two women will sit down for an onstage conversation at the museum on Sept. 12. “Two old women having shows at the Crocker at the same time,” Nilsson chuckles. “It’s just perfect!”

Adan at East Sacramento’s McKinley Village on March 16 in front of her 2019 public art installation Playhouse. (Photo by Max Whittaker)

In 1971, the works Adan presented in her master’s thesis show—including Panty Hose—created a stir. Pussyfoot Slippers  was a still life of a pair of shoes she had Stevens help her build up in wax to resemble vaginas, while Debutante Ball Slippers  was decorated with the corresponding male anatomy. “She got a lot of attention for these,” says Scott Shields. “They were kind of naughty. She was pretty out there.”

Panty Hose  was also featured in the San Francisco Art Institute Centennial Exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA). And a watercolor titled Happy Trails to You…Until We Meet Again, depicting a horse amid a surrealist jumble of landscape elements, was selected for Extraordinary Realities, a controversial exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1973, which included works by UC Davis professors William T. Wiley and Roy de Forest as well (New York Times  art critic Hilton Kramer titled his review “Smutty Jokes by Sophisticated Yokels”).

Adan’s student thesis show also impressed someone else in the local art scene: internationally celebrated sculptor and UC Davis art professor Robert Arneson (his Egghead  sculptures are defining icons on campus). “He wanted to trade Panty Hose  for one of his pieces,” Adan says, “and I was like, oh my God, this is the best thing that could ever happen to me.” Arneson had initially suggested she visit his studio to pick something out, but in the end, instead of the studio visit, Arneson offered up a sculpture called Six-Pack  via the gallerist who organized her show. Adan was so crestfallen not to get to see his studio that she turned the trade down. “To my regret, stubborn Suzanne didn’t take the Six-Pack,” she says now, although Arneson continued to go to her openings and was friendly and supportive.

When it came time for Adan to defend her thesis before a committee of professors, she went into rebellious mode again, and instead of appearing before the thesis committee, sent her new husband in her stead. Asked what his pitch was, Stevens laughs. “I said, ‘Suzanne really doesn’t give a shit. This is her work, and she thinks the work should speak for itself.’ ” The thesis committee accepted this and passed her, probably agreeing with curator Scott Shields’ assessment of this stunt as a bit of “performance art.” It was very Suzanne.

By the time Adan graduated, Stevens had landed a job teaching studio art at La Sierra High School in Carmichael. Adan and Stevens figured out a division of labor that worked for them: They’d become a one-salary household, living on Stevens’ teaching salary, while Adan would work from home creating her own art and managing the business side of both their careers, so that Stevens would have time to create art as well. Adan’s prodigious skills as an organizer served them both well. Stevens’ sculptures and assemblages often call on Americana imagery drawn from the couple’s extensive collection of toys and memorabilia, and he too has had a steady and prolific career. There’s enough affinity and dialogue between the two artists’ styles that they’ve held several joint shows, including at East Sacramento’s erstwhile JayJay gallery in 2013, which was titled Seven Year Itch, though they’d been married 43 years at the time. They also became locally prominent curators, including helming the Gregory Kondos Gallery at Sacramento City College, which they ran while teaching classes together at the school for almost a decade until 2019.

Playhouse weaves Adan’s funky, whimsical sensibility into the fabric of the city’s livable urbanism. (Photo by Max Whittaker)

In East Sacramento, Adan and Stevens both have permanent pieces on display. At McKinley Village, a kiosk decorated in Adan’s trademark birds, dogs and flying saucers occupies a beautifully landscaped park block, while in nearby Sutter Park, Stevens’ tall bronze of a stick-figure boy and his dog titled Big John and Sparky  stands sentinel over a patch of green space. Their harmonized voices are a perfect fit for these infill neighborhoods that combine the wholesomeness of Mayberry with an edgy, high-design sensibility and a sense of humor.

During my most recent trip out of Sacramento International, I budgeted in a few extra minutes to commune with Adan’s most high-profile work before heading through the TSA checkpoint. Those round-eyed birds in Flying Colors  looked at me as if I were in on the joke now that I knew so much about their creator. I leaned over and snapped a selfie with them and sent it to Adan. I have come to think of her wide-eyed birds as the springiest of spring chickens—plucky ambassadors for a city where art is fun, funky, alive and well.

Want to Learn About More Local Artists?

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“By Any Means Necessary, I Will Keep Being an Artist.” – Mike Henderson

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