Betsie Miller-KuszArtist: Dreaming Earth's Body
Betsie Miller-KuszBetsie Miller-Kusz was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico. She lived and painted in San Francisco for over thirty years and has exhibited widely in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well as New York, Santa Fe, and many areas of California. She now lives in New Mexico, where she owns a small rancho and studio, drawing continual inspiration from her surroundings in the beautiful Jemez Valley.
Her international exhibitions and projects have been held in Paris, London, Valencia, Madrid, Rome, Florence, Assisi, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Merida, Guadalajara, Guatemala, New Delhi, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Macau, Leningrad, Ulaan Bataar, and Seoul. She has painted numerous public murals in San Francisco and has collaborated with international artists in many projects, conferences, and cultural exchanges. Her works have been part of four International Biennales, in Florence, the Yucatan, and Tuscany. Her solo exhibitions have included Dhoomi Mal, the oldest contemporary art gallery in India, the Museo Ixchel in Guatemala, the Galeria Tonalli in Mexico City, and the Marie de 6th Arrondisement in Paris, as well as the International Maritime Museum in London, the Pinoteca Museo in Tlaxcala, Mexico, and Galeria Anagma, Valencia, Spain.
Betsie painted the last mural in the former Soviet Union, for the Second Human Rights Conference in Leningrad, working with two Russian artists. She then painted the first contemporary mural in Mongolia, working with a group of artists on a five-story building. She collaborated with Clowns without Borders for a mural painted in the basurero (garbage dump) in Guatemala City, painting with children living in unbearable conditions. She has two murals painted on small cultural centers deep in the Delta de Parañá in Argentina, inaccessible except by small boats beyond the huge South American waterways. Her longest international collaboration has been with photographer Masaru Tanaka of Hiroshima, working together on the Peace’s New Century Project, a 15-year commitment combining their joined images for peace. This project has been exhibited widely, including the United Nations in New York and Fuller Lodge in Los Alamos, as well as the War Memorial Building in San Francisco where the United Nations was founded.
Betsie taught painting classes in San Francisco for the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Recreation & Park Department and the New College of California. She served as Director of the Mural Resource Center for ten years, and then as Director of SomArts Gallery in the South of Market Cultural Center, where she curated over one hundred exhibitions. Dreaming Earth’s Body is her first literary collaboration.