Suzaan Boettger's engagement with the field of visual art has been lifelong. After alternating between majors in studio art and psychology at San Francisco State, and completing both, an extended and expansive solo journey throughout Europe led her to the realization that she could combine the sensory and the analytical in the study and practice of the history of art and art criticsm. Taking pleasure in the act of writing about works of art, she began publishing art reviews while a graduate student. After earning a Masters from University of California, Berkeley, in 1980 she wrote for many California publications including The San Francisco Chronicle and also Artforum for a few years before and after moving to NYC in 1985 to pursue a Ph.D. from the City University of New York and expanded publicating opportunities. She has written exhibition and book reviews and/or features for all of the major art magazines published in New York City in print or on the internet.

Dr. Boettger’s first book, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (University of California Press, 2003) was acclaimed by Library Journal as “a remarkable combination of insight and intellectual enthusiasm that, rare in a scholarly work, is easily accessible and a pleasure to read..” Her account of the first history of this earliest genre of contemporary Land Art sets it not only in relation to an expansive and inventive art scene in the 1960s, but within a wide social and political history including the beginnings of environmentalism, of the baby boom and anti-establishment youth culture, and the Vietnam War and antiwar activism. Earthworks has been acclaimed by noted art historian Ann Gibson as “Given its epic intellectual scope, amazingly reader-friendly.”

The books to which Dr. Boettger has contributed essays are Feminist Criticism in Action (Harper Collins, 1994), The Columbia Guide to America in the Sixties (Columbia, 2001); the MOCA/Whitney Museum exhibition catalogue for Robert Smithson (University of California, 2005), Brian Wall (Flowers, 2006); Ethics and the Visual Arts, (Allworth, 2006), and Roy Staab (Wisconsin, 2009). After discovering Nedko Solakov's series of witty, emotionally incisive drawings, "99 Fears" at Documenta in 2007, her contextualizing essay was published with them by Phaidon in fall 2008.

Dr. Boettger enjoys sharing her enthusiasm, analysis, and carefully culled jpg pictures with diverse audiences and finds great joy in traveling to do so, as in this photograph in Jerusalem from 2008 after speaking in Holon on women working in the environment. She is based in New York City.