Authenticity Above All: The Journey of Suprina
Truly good art is never accomplished when monetary value is prioritized. Suprina Kenney, who goes simply by Suprina, knows this all too well. At her studio in Poughkeepsie, she labors to create work that is personal and with intention, often focusing on environmental and political issues. Her pieces have been shown in multiple galleries across the country, including ones in Chicago, Scottsdale, Brooklyn, Harlem, and Newark as well as throughout the Hudson Valley.
Her Mononym derives from her Yugoslavian roots. Suprina took her father’s last name when she was 22.
“I never felt like the name they gave me my whole life and I’m a firm believer in the Indian philosophy of power in a name,” says Kenney. “There is power in a name and what you name things and so it’s important to love what people call you.
Suprina developed her passion for sculpting at a young age. “I had learning disabilities as a child with reading and math,” she explains. “I had a lazy eye, so I would often see double, which made it difficult to read or to concentrate on anything that was paper close to me. Art was a way around that. I found I was naturally good at art and so it empowered me in a way that I did not feel with other academic subjects at the time.”
After apprenticing for a sculptor during her senior year of high school and studying sculpture at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, Suprina would go on to have a lucrative career in promotional prop making. Her clients included big names such as Annie Leibovitz, Apple Computer, Bloomingdales, and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but found herself unsatisfied with her career “I was very successful and worked with very high-end clients, but I was always dancing around my own art, I was never making my art.”
This all changed after September 11th, 2001 when she would have an epiphany that would change the trajectory of her life.
“I lived three blocks away from ground zero in Manhattan when it happened. It made me face my own mortality in a way that I never did before. I just had a thought about how on my deathbed, am I going to say ‘you didn’t even try?’ Would it be okay with me to say I didn’t even try to make my own work and make that successful? That’s what made the change for me. I just thought ‘well you gotta try.’
Suprina was further influenced after meeting her husband Joe and moving in with him in his neighborhood of Harlem. There she would develop a heightened social awareness after witnessing racial discrimination and injustice, concepts that she would go on to discuss in her current work
“I saw injustices that, as a white woman, I had never seen before and didn’t really know existed until then. I learned about my own white privilege. Seeing young men, young black men lined up against the fence in the middle of the day, with some cops parading around and searching them when they were just being kids in the summertime not doing anything wrong. That made me delve into our societal issues around race and our justice system. The deeper I dug the more systemic I could see it was.”
This notion of generally unperceived inequity inspired her to work primarily with recycled materials.
“I work with trash mainly which is partially just from trying to deal with all the stuff we throw away all the time and trying to bring back its value. I see a complete parallel here between how we treat people that we don’t think have any power or aren’t very important, and how we treat our discards. We treat them the same way. In my very little, limited world, I try to open that up for discussion for other people who may not, like me 20 years ago, know this stuff. I look for my work to open up discussions about hard topics in America.”
This decision to dedicate her craft to what she truly believed in would ultimately come with challenges, primarily financial ones, resulting in their relocation to Poughkeepsie. “We lived basically on Joe’s income and my little bit of income. It was tough for us. I had a studio in Brooklyn Navy Yard for 11 years and the price of that studio just kept on going up and up and up and finally at one point it was like “this is just not sustainable, We can’t do this.” They ended up selling their building in Harlem and purchased a location under the Walkway over the Hudson, which also included a studio space. “My commute went from being over an hour to walking down two flights of stairs.”
Even though the Hudson Valley is comparatively much more affordable, Suprina is still struggling as an independent artist. Her day begins at five in the morning where, after caring for her seven rescue cats, she logs onto her computer to promote her studio and hunt for grant money in order to fund her endeavors before starting any creative work. Her art is also occasionally subsidized by Joe who works a regular job.
Although the process is arduous, Suprina has no intention of going back to her commercial roots, even at a smaller scale. “A lot of people end up doing Etsy or one of the art sale platforms and they create stuff that I consider more home goods than art. There’s a definite difference between the two but I completely understand why people do it. It is something that many artists have to choose. And maybe that’s better than getting a job somewhere, right? At least they’re still creating, whether they’re creating with the same intensity, purity and intention may be different but that’s what life does.”
When it comes to advice for young artists looking to build a career off of their personal art, Suprina offers one mantra above all. “If you don’t ask, then the answer is no. Always ask. Always. Even if you think no one’s gonna go for your idea, Ask. Figure out a way and you will be surprised at what doors open.”
She cites a recent example in which she had the idea to work with Poughkeepsie youth to paint the city garbage trucks to lift the spirits of the drivers as well as the community in general. I told some friends I was gonna approach the city about that and they said ‘they’re never gonna let you paint a garbage truck.’ Well, I’ve painted three so far.”
