MEDIUM: Mosaic and Mixed Media

STUDIO LOCATION: 53 at 6 Vernon Street

WEBSITE: glassandgroutarts.com

Instagram: @glassandgrout

Facebook: @glassandgrout

Susan Altman has been making mosaics for more than twenty years, following on the heels of graphic design, watercolor, pastels, wheel-thrown pottery, quilting, and jewelry design. She is attracted to the permanence and solidity of mosaics, and their variable surfaces and textures. She loves colors and building things, and likes her art to serve a function. She uses discarded and used materials whenever possible: wood from construction projects, pots and pans, broken pottery, keys and hardware, discarded furniture, bottle caps, rocks, seashells, and once-loved toys. She has made wall hangings, free-standing sculptures, stepping stones, garden ornaments, and jewelry. She creates sculpture from discarded waste such as bottlecaps, plastic bags, and non-redeemable aluminum containers.

 Susan is a proud member of i3c, a New England-based group of artists who are committed to inspiring awareness of—and action toward—improving the human-made environmental and climate crisis through art. She also belongs to two wonderful mosaic-focused arts organizations: the New England Mosaic Society and CMA2. 

Since 2018 Susan has been part of the team that developed and opened Medford’s first complete arts center in 2024--Arts Collaborative Medford (www.artscollabmedford.org).  Susan is currently the board president of ACM. She served for several years on the board of directors of ArtsMedford, organizing and facilitating many projects and events, including Making Art Together workshops for families, two retail art spaces, and MARV the Medford Arts Resource Vehicle, which brought art into the community from 2017 to 2021. 

When she can cobble together some spare time, she develops and produces public art projects. In 2023 she worked with more than a hundred children and adults to create Medford High School’s first exterior artwork: a large-scale multi-part mosaic in the theme of rainbows.  She coordinated a mixed-media wall piece designed and built by several middle school students, a mosaic wall piece created by four families working together over four sessions, a utility switchbox mosaic, and a large mixed media wall hanging created by many volunteers, to be displayed in a public library. In 2016 Susan received a STARS grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council to serve as Artist in Residence at the Roberts Elementary School in Medford, MA, where she taught almost six hundred children how to make mosaics and guided them through the process of creating a mosaic from a concept developed by the student body as a whole. The finished 7x12 foot mosaic, which was created by the children in just two weeks, is displayed in the main hall of the school..