Collector had eye for art, championed outsider artists
Chicago art collector Susann Craig championed outsider artists and co-founded Chicago’s Intuit Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.
“Susann was attracted to compulsively made items like intuitive art, but also handmade signs, art cars and fantastical outdoor environments,” said architect Jeanne Gang, a longtime friend who designed Craig’s Logan Square loft. “She liked the adventure of discovering interesting things, and the people who made them. It was her childlike fascination that made it so fun to work with her.”
Craig, 84, died of complications from breast cancer on June 28 at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California, said her daughter, Amy Coleman. Craig had been visiting her daughter in Venice, California, and attending her granddaughter’s high school graduation when her cancer battle worsened, her daughter said.
Born Susann Eickmeyer in Youngstown, Ohio, Craig grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and Greenwich, Connecticut. She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she later attended graduate school in art history.
With a friend and fellow art collector, Craig opened a small consignment shop in Champaign in the early 1960s called The Gallery, Ltd.
“My dad said to my mom, ‘They don’t really have any antique and consignment shops in Champaign-Urbana — you should open one,’ ” Coleman recalled. “The next day, she went into Champaign and found a little storefront.”
The store quickly grew to sell art, clothing, toys and accessories. The family bought a small cottage in Leland, Michigan, and Craig eventually opened two similar stores in the area, The Limited LTD in Leland, and then in 1987, Lima Bean in Suttons Bay.
Craig and her then-husband, noted documentary producer Scott Craig, moved from Champaign to Chicago in 1963. Craig taught art at Columbia College Chicago in the 1970s and also worked as director of the Dorothy Rosenthal Gallery on East Ontario Street in the Streeterville neighborhood.
After a 1980 divorce, Craig began representing various lines of apparel and soon opened The Susann Craig Showroom at Chicago’s Apparel Center. She mostly retired from that work when she closed her showroom in 2009, although she continued to represent several lines for the next few years.
Craig accumulated a large amount of folk art and outsider art. Among the artists whose work she championed were Sister Gertrude Morgan and William Dawson.
“She had this incredible eye, and she trusted her eye so much,” said Chicago artist Cheryl Pope, a neighbor. “She’d come to my studio, and (artwork) I’d be like, ‘whatever’ about, she’d say, ‘No, send this to your gallery.’ I would, and it’d sell the next week.”
In 1991, Craig helped found Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, now located in River West.
“She had such excitement, almost a compulsion, for discovering artists, new and untrained talent,” Coleman said. “So I think that as her collection grew, so did her circle of friends who had also started collecting some of these treasures together, and I think they realized there wasn’t any museum that focused on this kind of art.”
Andrew Griffin, a friend and supporter of Intuit, said Craig was a “Chicago treasure” whose “shtick was, there is no bad art.”
“If you were eccentric and an artist, Susann was your interlocutor with the larger community,” Griffin said.
Craig served on Intuit’s board for 29 years and was honored with the museum’s Visionary Award in 2018. The museum also has announced that a gallery at the museum will be named for her.
The 2,200-square-foot loft Gang designed for Craig in Logan Square is in a former factory and has an atrium and a retractable domed skylight. It was designed to house Craig’s art collection.
“Her loft was a wonderful sort of personal museum of outsider folk art,” said Jan Petry, a fellow outsider art aficionado. “Her loft was a refuge for a lot of good times. And I don’t think Susann ever had a bad day. She found joy in everything.”
Craig is also survived by another daughter, Jennifer Knight; four grandchildren; and two sisters, Jane Kiernan and Mary Lou Coe.
A memorial service will take place in Leland, Michigan, on Aug. 9 at The Old Art Building, while a local memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. on Nov. 6 at St. Paul’s United Church of Christ, 2335 N. Orchard St., Chicago. A celebration will follow at Intuit.