A Women's Thing

“Rooms by the Sea”: Susan Chen at Edward Hopper’s House

The awt editors

Susan Chen first went to Cape Cod in the summer of 2015 with her husband, then her boyfriend, whose family has a house there, and every year after that she thought she really wanted to make paintings there. In the summer of 2024 she snuck some canvases and a painting cart up with her and, as she puts it, fell into a wormhole of making paintings. The result is nearly forty canvases painted outdoors in Truro, Eastham and Provincetown, now on view in “Rooms by the Sea,” her first museum solo exhibition, at the Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center in Nyack, New York, the house where Hopper was born and grew up. Her paintings hang with works on paper and watercolors by Edward Hopper and Josephine Nivison Hopper, and the title work is a large double portrait of Chen and her husband at the Cape, a nod to Hopper’s 1951 painting of the same name. We asked her about painting days, bugs and the Hoppers.

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