Susan Ayers

Susan Ayers kept a studio over a laundromat in Chicago, where she’d paint after midnight when the machines hummed loudest. She worked in quiet bursts, using old house paint and stiff brushes to build thick, gritty layers that caught the light like cracked sidewalk. Her best-known pieces sit in the Art Institute’s storage, but one called *Untitled* (late 1900s) shows how she turned dull colors into something alive—try zooming in on the streaks of rust-red and bone-white and watch them seem to breathe.