Susi Lulaki at home with a selection of her fanciful ceramic sculptures (photo by Jim Barcus)
The Kansas City artist is also an educator and writer who has contributed to arts organizations across the city for nearly 50 years
Susi Lulaki is a magical talent, creative to her core.
A global citizen, the Kansas City artist carries with her the myths, stories, sights and sounds of the various lands she has visited and inhabited throughout her life. While raised in Kansas City, Lulaki is a spiritual native of Greece, Spain, France and New York, where she has lived, and boasts a scholar’s historical and cultural knowledge of these and other places including Mexico, the Middle East and Morocco.
For the last 20 years Lulaki has made her primary home on Kansas City’s West Side, surrounded by her outdoor and indoor sculptures, reliefs, paintings, prints and illustrated children’s books. She now works full time as an artist, having taught art and art history through the years at numerous Kansas City schools and museums, as well as being a published art reviewer and arts administrator. Her murals and outdoor sculptures are installed throughout the region.
One of Lulaki’s most celebrated concrete sculptures was installed in 2021 on the four-mile PrairyArt Path in Matfield Green, Kansas, which is free to the public. Architect and artist Bill McBride started PrairyArt Path, an ongoing project to help preserve and educate people about the historic and dramatic landscape of the Flint Hills. He also refurbished old buildings on the land, which are now Airbnbs.
“Julia McBride asked me to make a sculpture for the path that a 14-year- old girl would love, and that’s what I did,” Lulaki says. “Everyone just calls it ‘The Goddess.’”
Lulaki is also known for her wildly imaginative ceramic sculptures — hybrids of mythical beings such as harpies, mermaids, centaurs and Amazons, intertwined with animals and birds of all species. “I love making ceramics because it grounds me,” she says.
Animals and nature are magical for her, so she has made ceramics of her cat, whom she often traveled with, the guineas she saw while staying at Matfield Green, as well as various sea creatures she became familiar with in Greece.
Her work is sold at Blue Gallery in the Crossroads, where owner Kelly Kuhn says: “In her work Susi references antiquities and mythologies, resulting in something better — innocent, hilarious and wise. She has the rare combination of a very serious artist who does not take herself or the outcome too seriously. She allows each piece to tell her what it wants to become and therein lies something magical and pure.”
A MULTITALENTED CREATOR
Lulaki’s path to art was geographically wide and professionally varied.
She had her own clothing line, designed and sewed hundreds of toy animals using French provincial fabrics, created and ran a restaurant and opened a juice bar.
“I don’t have a very linear life,” Lulaki says, “and in some ways it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But I like it like that. And I never went partying or drinking. When I needed refuge I went to museums, libraries and galleries.”
At 19, after one year at the University of Arizona and one year at Barnard College, Lulaki moved to the Navajo reservation to learn weaving techniques. She then attended the California School of Arts and Crafts for two years and subsequently flew to Paris, where she managed the Shakespeare & Company bookstore while living upstairs. She then lived in Morocco for a month and next moved for a year to a small town in Spain.
When Lulaki decided to finish her degree in art, she returned to Kansas City and attended the Kansas City Art Institute for three semesters. She went back to New York City to take one more semester at the New York School of the Arts and was then granted a BFA from KCAI.
While in New York she and a friend created a clothing line, “Susan Silk,” which she describes as “boho.” At one point she needed a dress form. Told that Charles James, the legendary Anglo-American designer, had the very best, Lulaki went to his residence and studio at the famed Chelsea hotel, where he was living in decline.
“I didn’t know who he was, but he asked me to work for him that very day,” Lulaki says, “and I did various jobs for him for about a year, until 1975.
“I walked his weird dog, and also sewed, cleaned and helped document his career,” Lulaki remembers. “Eventually I decided to move to Greece and told Charles I was leaving, which upset him. When people asked him where I had gone, he told them I had been hit by a bus.” (James died in 1978, and since then his avant-garde clothing has been featured in museum retrospectives, and he has been the subject of books and a movie).
FINDING HER VOICE
It was in Greece that Lulaki felt most at home. She met her future husband there and gave birth to her first child, Zoe, while living in Athens (Lulaki’s second daughter, Christina, a musician, lives full time in Athens now, and Lulaki lives in Greece one month a year). Lulaki absorbed many aspects of Greek culture, including its powerful mythology, which she integrates into her art.
Upon returning to Kansas City in 1978, the family lived in Waldo. Lulaki continued to sew for the Pierre Deux store on the Country Club Plaza. She also worked at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art from 1979 to 2012 as an art educator, was a docent and art educator at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art from 1998 to 2000 and was on the art and art history faculty at Metropolitan Community College from 2002 to 2008. Lulaki made etchings and monotypes at Hand Print Press at the University of Missouri Kansas City art department, and in 1996 received an M.A. in printmaking and art history from UMKC.
In 1981 Lulaki opened the wildly successful Greek restaurant Athena in a small, dilapidated space off 31st and Main, which later moved to 36th and Broadway. Foodies were always there, along with the Mission Hills crowd and artists working in all genres. There were serious art installations on the walls, and guests were invited to draw on the white tablecloths. The wait staff consisted mainly of artists and actors such as Tony Naponic, Ray Starzman and Rebecca Ofiesh, along with waiters from around the world.
“We definitely had the best-looking transvestites as customers,” Lulaki says.
After years of juggling various careers, Lulaki decided to close the restaurant. She opened Sun Ray, Kansas City’s first natural juice bar. She wrote for Review Magazine and was associate editor there from 2003 to 2005. When she decided to commit full-time to artmaking, she began experimenting with concrete.
“I never took a class in sculpture,” she says, “but I looked at a lot of it in Greece, Rome and London. I lived next door to a sculptor in Greece, and he taught me how to paint on rocks.
“As a child I lived outdoors, kind of like a wild animal. I loved to play in mud and water. My experience of the world was primarily visceral; I’m really a citizen of eco-systems.”
Anne Pearce, professor of art at Soka University of America in California, is a longtime friend of Lulaki. She describes the sensation of being with her: “Imagine a bottle that is all black with a closed lid. That’s the world. The lid comes off the bottle, and all these beautiful fireflies come out and fly all over, like flickering rainbows. Susi is the rainbow. She has all the wisdom in the world but hardly anyone sees or listens.”
“I’ve always loved fairy tales and cosmologies,” Lulaki says. “Ultimately I just want to know: Why are we all here on earth?”
