A “southern woman who happened to be born in Chicago,” Susan Downing-White lives and works on Dog River, which flows into Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Outside the studio, she enjoys gardening, fiber arts, and cycling. Her education includes a BFA degree and three years working as a painting conservator’s assistant. Downing-White has exhibited at NOMA, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and many other regional museums and university galleries. Her work is featured in prominent corporate and private collections. Her ongoing series of oil paintings, Memento, records changes to specific landscapes within a 100-mile radius of her studio over the past three decades. Her recent series of painted maps, Where Water Meets Land, explores the same landscape from a point of view above the clouds. The two perspectives capture the fleeting grace of life in fragile places.