Suzanne Sunshine’s Lower Manhattan Spaces

The five large-scale abstract paintings which comprise Lower Manhattan Spaces were created especially for the lobby of 45 Broadway. They are in many ways emblematic of the merging of two of the artist’s main passions: art and real estate.

Sunshine attended Brown University, where she studied with prominent art historian Kermit Champa, and graduated from Columbia Business School. In addition to her painting, work as an assistant art curator, and membership at the Art Students League of New York, Sunshine is also the founder of the commercial real estate advisory firm S. Sunshine & Associates, LLC, which advises nonprofits on real estate matters, a program officer with the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, a non-profit financial institution that supports community development corporations, and previously served as vice president for the Dana Foundation, a private foundation that supports brain research.

In keeping with her philanthropic bent, Sunshine will donate ten percent of the proceeds from any exhibit sales to Poets & Writers, a literary nonprofit, which she helped relocate to the titular Lower Manhattan.

Artist and art historian Adrienne Farb believes that Sunshine’s “dual sense of artistic and humanitarian engagement” as well as her deep “knowledge of architectural spaces and structures propel her innate understanding of the canvas shape…In witnessing the pictorial space of her canvases, we ourselves become part of a larger more universal and open-ended space. The paintings envelope us, both by their scale and by their intensity. They extend beyond the shapes of the canvases and fill the room. They are at once powerful, delicate, and very determined.”

These paintings, Farb insists, “demand multiple viewings to reveal [their] intricacies and complexities. Sunshine creates forms that move and bend, appear and disappear. Her paintings feel essential and infinite.”