Sue Havens: Speed Bump

EXHIBITION DATES: september 2 - 27, 2025

RECEPTION: Thursday, september 4, 5 - 8 pm

Closing RECEPTION: Saturday, september 27, 4 - 6 pm

The Painting Center is pleased to present Speed Bump, an exhibition of new works by Sue Havens in the Main Gallery. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, September 2, and runs through Saturday, September 27, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 4, from 5 to 8 pm. This exhibition features paintings on paper, wooden sculptural paintings, and paintings on panel. 

Sue Havens is an artist based in New York and Tampa. Since moving to Florida to accept an R-1 position at The University of South Florida, Havens has expanded a large body of work that reflects an embodiment of her surroundings, demonstrating a complex dialogue between painting and sculpture, two and three-dimensionality, and installation.

Excerpt from Geoffrey Young’s essay: “With a tile-fitter’s care in placing shapes, Sue Havens’ rage for order is balanced by her love of storm and accident. Her works on paper are filled to the brim with randomly generated distributions of rain-like dust and the debris of cosmic instability. Her concern is to activate the surface of each work, putting each set of decisions in contact with a world where unforeseen things happen. Smudges, stains, and spills find happy homes where the maker’s hand meets rigorous contingencies of all kinds. A Havens is a place where structure and collision are part of the way things are.”

Havens earned her BFA in Art from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art from 1990 to 1995, and her MFA in painting from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2003. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at The University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, where she has been teaching for ten years. Havens has exhibited internationally and nationally in venues such as The Tampa Museum of Art, The Sarasota Art Museum (FL), The Marjorie Barrick Museum (NV), The Museum of Drawings (Sweden), Mindy Solomon (Miami), among many others. Havens was a 2008 Fellowship recipient in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her work was featured in Warhol’s Interview Magazine. 

Full Essay by Geoffrey Young:

With a tile-fitter’s care in placing shapes, Sue Havens’ rage for order is balanced by her love of storm and accident. Her works on paper are filled to the brim with randomly generated distributions of rain-like dust and the debris of cosmic instability. Her concern is to activate the surface of each work, putting each set of decisions in contact with a world where unforeseen things happen. Smudges, stains, and spills find happy homes where the maker’s hand meets rigorous contingencies of all kinds. A Havens is a place where structure and collision are part of the way things are. 

Consider the clarity of her diamond and circular shapes as suggestive of real things without being representational. Her X’s compete with O’s, her vertical lines are propped up or countered by horizontal ones. Havens’ rectangles lock in as they cluster and group. In a nod to process, these works, by design, seem to have survived creative chaos. The playful repetition of specific shapes masquerades as building blocks. The range of her grays alone is masterful, reminding the viewer to study the confidence of her color choices, including the judicious but restrained use of the primaries. 

I read her geometric realities as more symbolic of labor than of actual factory life. Still, nothing is too pure in a Havens not to undergo some agitation, some drama in the effort to invest it with risk. If these works rime with a world where work is central, where action stimulates production, it is because art triumphs over uncertainty. And happily, these complex works are never too busy to woo viewers with sophisticated aesthetic registrations. 

- Geoffrey Young