uma people: susan ragland

uma people:
​Susan Ragland

Profile by Lily Kind

Susan Raglan has been coming to UMA since September of 2018. She’s been painting for thirty years. When I ask her about the connection between dancing and painting, she tells me “Whatever my figures are doing, I want them to look like they’re dancing --” she takes a moment to consider what she’s said “or vibing. They are vibing.” Susan describes her process as intuitive; she sees the idea for a painting before her brush touches the page. When she describes her paintings to me, rather than explaining what she’s made and why, she is describing what she sees. Ragland draws a distinction between herself and the figures in her paintings, “I wear my hair tight-tight-tight but nobody in my painting wears their hair tight, it's all free flowing.” Ragland paints with gouache and acrylic in order to achieve bright, opaque colors that cover big ground. She paints figures, usually in small groups, who are actively doing something social together: playing, dancing, caring for each other. Her figures are often dressed in whimsical patterns and interlocking neon colors. “The hair and the hands contain the energy” she tells me. “In life, I’m uptight, but when I’m painting or dancing, I feel free.”

When I ask about her relationship to selling her art, she doesn’t offer gallery names or price ranges. Rather, she points out that she has prints and household items for sale as low as seven dollars. She tells me her prints are bought mostly by women, “Just women, a lot of women look at the prints and think: Oh, I have kids, but the originals, I have sold a lot to men also” And the originals, which sell quickly, are bought by “people with an interest in collecting.” When prodded, Ragland has told me that most of her work is in private collections up and down both coasts. Ragland is a prolific painter, and the fact that she doesn’t have a lot of stock sitting around points to how in demand her work is. “I've been doing it since I was thirty, so about thirty years,” Ragland explains. “There are a couple of paintings I choose to keep. But I’ve sold almost everything I’ve painted.”

Ragland is largely self-taught and identifies as an ‘urban folk artist.’ In a 2019 article, she cites both William H. Johnson and Jacob Lawrence as influences; artists whose work she saw in museums, and whose treatment of figures encouraged her to represent bodies and movement using her own design sensibilities. There’s a similar interest in representing real life moments of American life in black and brown communities. However, Ragland’s attention to textile and fabric resembles how Amy Sherald (who painted Michelle Obama’s official portrait) paints fabric and fashions, celebrating how black women especially develop personal style and aesthetic. Like Sherald, Ragland focuses on bringing a pattern to life, rather than the shading of every wrinkle and fold. Her celebration of hair as a cathartic, expressive, life giving force is in the same tradition of the late Tamara Natalie Madden’s lushly colorful portraits of black women with Afro-futuristic, patterned and geometric hair dos. 

Ragland has been in Philly for fifteen years but was DC born and bred. “Black and latinx that was my world,” she tells me, of growing up in segregated DC. She also tells me that she was often the first to dance at a party, and there were plenty of funky parties to dance at. When I ask about music from her youth, she seems to comb through files in her mind before she starts singing “Set if Off.” She tells me a story about her first formal dance class; it was something that resembled ballet taught by a hunched over old lady at their local church. “I like dancing, I’ve always liked dancing, I always wanted to dance.” She tells me about getting in with a group of girls in her high school, many of whom became professional dancers, doing “late 80’s jazzy type stuff...They liked me because I could pick up steps but didn't have the technique of someone who had trained for years.” She tells me about the sessions before middle school classes when her and her friends would just mess around dancing to music by Kool and the Gang. Ragland explains how her first Locking class with Dru transported her back to this time:

“It was one of the first classes; he started a warm up, and in his warm up he was doing these dances that I did when I was eleven or twelve years old. I know the whole class was imitating him, but I was transformed back to my childhood. It was a magical moment. How does this man 20 years my junior -- how is he able to take me back?”

After that, she rarely missed a class, coming to lock at UMA every Sunday. With a note of seriousness she says, “I came back every time.” Locking is back at UMA, this time taught by Ricky, also a member of The Hood Lockers, from the same crew as Dru. “I will tell you this. I miss Dru. I am fascinated by Dru, when Dru comes in I could just watch him!”  Ragland misses Dru, but she’s stoked to have Ricky teaching. “Ricky is drawing me in, ” she says. Ragland has been at every class since Locking re-started.  Ragland is also a regular in Laurel Card’s morning classes. I ask her what keeps her coming back to UMA classes, “Because they are fun! They’re challenging. They’re authentic.” I push her to define that authenticity, as she feels it at UMA. 
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“I think teachers here are committed to their art form. That’s not like a person who is trying to get paid for an aerobics class. And that authenticity speaks to a respect for study and a respect for culture. I think that respect bleeds into the people it attracts to the studio. And the people who come to the studio are moved by a similar spirit.”

Through Thick and thin

artwork by Susan Ragland