Sue Ferguson Gussow

Professor Emerita

Sue Ferguson Gussow is a figurative painter who works in a wide range of drawing and painting media. Gussow is a graduate of The Cooper Union, Columbia University, and holds a Masters of Fine Art from Tulane University. Professor Gussow has served on the faculties of both the School of Art and the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union and has taught and lectured at several universities and art institutions, among them Yale, Columbia, Bennington, New York University, Maryland Art Institute, Parsons School of Design and the Frick Collection. She currently teaches ARCH 178, Advanced Drawing Seminar and has taught ARCH 114, Freehand Drawing.

Professor Gussow's work is widely represented in the collections of various museums including the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, the Minnesota Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Free Library, and has been represented in the Museum of Modern Art lending collection. Private collections that hold her work include those of the C.B.S. Building, Werner Kramarsky, Francois deMenil, Dore Ashton, and the estates of Van Deren Coke, Jeanette Rockefeller and John Hejduk. Notable among her many solo exhibitions was the exhibit mounted at the Stanford Museum (1982–83) to honor her year at Stanford University as the Pamela Djerassi Visiting Artist. More recently, a retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery of The Cooper Union in 1997. In conjunction with the exhibit, The Cooper Union published DRAW POKER, an extensive portfolio of her drawings on that subject.

Projects & Links

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.