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As much as anyone could, Suda House represents the artistic cross-fertilization possible in the Los Angeles of the 1970s. As a student at the University of Southern California early in the decade she was exposed to photography by Philip Melnick and to printmaking by longtime USC professor Ruth Weisberg. In 1973 she became a trainee at the 3M Color-in-Color office, where she met Ellen Landweber, the local master of the process, and Robert Heinecken, who invited her to sit in at UCLA graduate seminars. By 1974 she was enrolled in the graduate program at California State University, Fullerton, where she studied with Darryl Curran and Eileen Cowin, and where her fellow students included George Blakely.

House used the 3M machine to make images which she then transferred to fabric, sometimes then stuffing the fabric to heighten the illusion of reality. Her work of the mid- to late seventies dealt exclusively with sexual imagery, satirizing and critiquing our society’s fascination with the female body.

The Stay Free Series of 1976 presented soft-core sexual images on a material not usually associated with the sexual act of copulation, yet clearly related to women’s sexuality: the “sanitary napkin.” Even so oblique a reference to menstruation as a wad of cotton and paper was a shock to most people when they saw the piece in a gallery, House says: “It was originally an interactive piece—people would handle them, take them off the wall and move them around… When they realized what they were, people were either repulsed by them or attracted to them.”¹

1. Suda House, telephone interview with the author, 6 March 1992. ↩︎