Video Guide to Sedona

A Video Portal to Sedona & Northern AZ Destinations

Susan Kliewer

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Susan Kliewer featured at Mountain Trails Gallery, Tlaquepaque
336 SR 179
Sedona, AZ 86336

Proud Traditions bronze sculpture by Susan Kliewer

Leading the West - bookends by Susan Kliewer

portrait of Susan Kliewer


Born in Orange County, California, in 1940, Susan Kliewer is one of the Southwest's most acclaimed contemporary sculptors. A native of Southern California, she has made Arizona her home for 40 years. She spent five of those years at the Marble Canyon Trading Post in a remote area of Northern Arizona, adjacent to the Navajo Reservation. A painter since the age of ten, Susan turned to sculpting in 1987, after working in an art casting foundry for ten years. In 1993 Susan won a competition to create a monument of Sedona Schnebly. A ten-foot high sculpture of her town's namesake was installed in front of the Sedona City Library. Kliewer's life-size fountain portraying the Sinagua people and a fountain of a Hopi Water Maiden are also to be found in Sedona. Other sculptures by Susan Kliewer are located in the US and Europe. Susan often uses her Navajo friends and relatives as models to capture the special intimacy which is a hallmark of her work. Her depiction of cowboys and Indians in everyday life, from the past as well as the present are, as one critic said, "truly heartfelt". "My work", says Kliewer, "aims to show the common thread that underlies all human experience, and which, I hope, brings us to a greater understanding between all peoples".