Suzi Click

An Eclectic

Cross-Cultural Style

 

 

 

“As an artist I have always been influenced by tribal cultures—their costumes, their fabrics and especially their use of embellishment and ability to mix different elements together.”
                

Scratch the surface of Suzi Click’s daily penchant for donning delightfully layered and multicultural “hippie chick” attire, and there is a mature artist with an international outlook and a well-honed design perspective. Her approach reveals a joyful focus on an enthusiastic creative dictum that “more is better”—advocating the message that with a confident mixture of elements, every woman can be empowered about expressing herself fashionably through her unique personal selection of attire and adornment. Click aims to design vividly collaged artisan apparel and accessories for those “who want to be noticed for their style and stand out in a crowd, to express their inner selves and to openly acknowledge their innate goddess.”

Click’s home is a spacious 1924 Spanish Revival/Craftsman style structure in central Los Angeles, with an adjacent converted garage that is now a two-level studio/workspace, which she shares with her artist husband, David B. Lewis. It is an enchanting magic carpet world filled with a lush cornucopia of intertwined patterns and textures, imbued with the richly saturated rainbow of colors that are inspired by her frequent far-flung travels, and by her unabashedly passionate collecting of textiles, objects, images, decorative furniture, and folk art that are curated into altar-like arrangments. Certain spaces within the house are dedicated to a particular suggestive theme, such as iconic retablos depicting the Virgin of Guadalupe (symbolizing the presence of “woman power”) alongside of ornate crosses; or multiple images of one of her most venerated style exemplars, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo—who proclaimed that one should “dress every day like it is a fiesta”—a motto that Click heartily endorses.

During her journeys she makes keen forays into the bazaars, souks, villages, and artists’ workshops whose spirit-infused handicrafts she treasures and gathers. She loves to shop and is always on a dedicated quest for lengths of distinctive fabrics, handwoven panels, intricate borders, and special buttons or tassels which she then deftly incorporates into her own assemblages of wearable, one-of-a-kind designs.  

 

 

by Tamara W. Hill
issue 37.1

 

 

Tamara W. Hill
Tamara W. Hill is a multifaceted artist and jewelry designer, as well as a photographer, free-lance writer, art history teacher, independent scholar, and curator, who began her career as a contemporary art critic for Artforum magazine. She has authored three books ranging in subject from early American gravestone designs and symbols to modern painting and traditional Bolivian weavings. Hill has traveled widely, documenting sacred monuments, historical sites, shrines, and handpainted trade signs throughout the world. Like her admired colleague Suzi Click, Hill has been an avid collector of ethnographic jewelry, folk arts and textiles. Originally from the New York area, she has resided in San Francisco for over thirty years.

 

  

 

 

This article in its entirety appears only in the print magazine.

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