Nick Hallett
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Tue Oct 13th, 2009 1:15 p.m.
Image: Suzanne Fiol in 1997, photo taken by Michelle Handelman
The New York art and music community mourns the loss of one of its fiercest advocates for experimental culture, Suzanne Fiol, founder and director of the ISSUE Project Room, a venue for music, performance, film, and literature currently located at the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus, Brooklyn. She passed away last Monday at age 49 after a year-long battle with lung cancer.
Born and raised in New York, Suzanne studied photography at Antioch College in Ohio and the Art Institute of Chicago, before returning home in 1983 to earn her MFA from Pratt Institute, cultivating a style that superimposed layers of paint over her original photos in an attempt to capture the “ecstatic moment” of her subject material. Her career yoked creative pursuits with the business end of the art world. She worked as a gallerist in SoHo while immersing herself in downtown’s No-Wave-tinged culture, where she met her husband, Joaquin Fiol at the Mudd Club. The birth of their daughter, Sarah in 1991, prompted a sabbatical, but after the dissolution of her marriage at the dawn of the 21st century, Suzanne was back on the scene, working with artists and, once again, engaging passionately with music, becoming active in the community that orbited around avant-jazz club Tonic on the Lower East Side.
In 2003, her involvement with the Issue Management photo agency, whose office space was on East 6th street, yielded the earliest version of ISSUE Project Room, which quickly took off as an important new venue for the presentation of experimental music and multi-disciplinary performance. When the photo agency folded and the landlord raised the rent, Suzanne fully committed herself to finding ISSUE Project Room a more permanent residence in the borough she called home, Brooklyn ...
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Michael Connor