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Suzanne Forbes

Deutschland / Berlin

Suzanne Forbes is a queer, disabled artist from New York City. She studied at The Art Students League, Parsons School of Design, and The School of Visual Art before finishing her BFA in Fine Arts at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Suzanne first became sick with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis in 1986, after a CMV infection. Her first professional work was as a television courtroom artist in the 90s. In 1994 she achieved her dream of becoming a penciller on a DC Comics comic book, Star Trek The Original Series. Suzanne drew 14 issues of TOS and other Star Trek comics, a total of over 350 pages, while experiencing significant MECFS illness. Suzanne left the comics industry during the collapse and moved to the Bay Area, where she lived until 2015. In 2005, after hustling many jobs at startups and fine food businesses, she returned to drawing and painting.

In painting portraits of her goth friends in fetish wear and live drawing at kinky parties, Suzanne found her vocation. Despite increasingly severe illness, she went to hundreds of events and made hundreds of drawings and paintings in San Francisco, from leather daddies to drag queens to dominatrixes. All this work is available online, free to download, print and share, on her flickr archives.

Suzanne and her third husband moved to Berlin in 2015, to build a life with more affordable healthcare. Suzanne found joy and community in Queer Berlin, and discovered the incredible drag culture and vibrant sex worker activism of the city. She made over a thousand drawings from 2015 to 2024, as she became progressively more disabled by MECFS, until she found she could no longer work at all. With limited capacity remaining, she has committed all her resources to making a beautiful physical book of her art.

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Team Demimonde

Demimonde: The Live Drawing of Suzanne Forbes

A luxe book of documentary drawings by Suzanne Forbes. 20 years of intimate portraits made live in San Francisco & Berlin fetish clubs and drag shows.
16,481 € (114%)
Demimonde: The Live Drawing of Suzanne Forbes