George and Susan Quasha

Interview conducted by Erin Zona on August 10, 2023 in Barrytown, NY

George Quasha is an artist, musician, poet, and publisher from White Plains, New York. He has been awarded the 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship in video art as well as the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry for works that often subvert common principles within language, sculpture, sound, installation, and performance. Susan Quasha is a poet, photographer, and designer who has exhibited works at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, the Center for Curatorial Studies, and the Kleinert/James Art Center, among other venues. The recently published Gnostalgia for the Present (2023) is the seventeenth installment of their collaborative series of poems and photographs.

George and Susan Quasha founded Station Hill Press, an independent press dedicated to publishing experimental literature, in 1977 in Barrytown, New York. Initially connecting with Schneemann in 1978 through their mutual involvement in the avant-garde poetry scene, the Quashas remained close friends and correspondents of Schneemann, hosting her at their annual holiday parties and exchanging research on alternative medicine, dreamspace, and art theory.

In this excerpt, George Quasha talks about Schneemann’s working process and the primacy of her bodily experience of the environment.