Susan O’Malley was an optimist. That’s a rare type of person to come by these days. Optimism requires a special kind of vision, an ability to see the world differently than it appears on the surface. Lucky for us, the late San Francisco artist and curator used her work to share that sensibility with others, letting anyone glimpse the possibility of a better world.
O’Malley’s work spanned across performance, video, installation, and printmaking, often pushing the boundaries of what art could be. In one early project, she ordained herself San Jose Artist in Residence and created guerilla-style sculptural interventions in her neighbors’ lawns, writing words in gravel or creating crop circles in a layer of frost.
Today, she is perhaps best known for her series of motivational posters featuring quotes cribbed from her book project Advice from My 80-Year-Old Self, in which she asked strangers what they thought their 80-year-old self might want them to know.
On Thursday, O’Malley’s friends and former collaborators will soon offer inside perspectives of her life and legacy at SFMOMA. The October 8 event is in celebration of the release of the first career-spanning monograph of O’Malley’s work, It Will Be More Beautiful Than You Could Ever Imagine, edited by Christina Amini.
Speakers include local artists Jessica Martin, Leah Rosenberg and Christine Wong Yap; co-director of Romer Young Gallery Joey Piziali O’Malley’s sister Ellen O’Malley Kato; and Amini, steward of the Susan O’Malley Estate and — perhaps most importantly — O’Malley’s best friend.
Amini and O’Malley met as freshman at Stanford in 1995, where Amini studied English and O’Malley was an urban studies major, a background that turned out to be pivotal to her art practice.
While O’Malley took some art classes as an undergraduate, she hadn’t “quite given herself permission to be an artist yet,” Amini said. “Urban studies made sense for Susan because she was really interested in people and their connection with place. She was intrigued by ideas of where and how we live.”
After college, O’Malley and Amini moved with a group of friends to Brooklyn, where O’Malley’s day job as an office admin at an ad agency nudged her towards an art practice. She taught herself design software during downtime at work, while the malaise of corporate America fully pushed her to pursue the much more exciting life of an artist, Amini said.
She returned home to San Jose in 2001 and began taking printmaking classes at Foothill College in Mountain View while working at an art gallery in Palo Alto. In 2006, O’Malley received an MFA from the California College of the Arts, where she was among the inaugural cohort in the first Social Practice program in the country, studying with experimental artists like Jonn Herschend, Ted Purves (1967–2017), and Jon Rubin.
Amini returned to the Bay Area shortly after O’Malley and quickly became her artistic collaborator.
Projects they executed together included “The Pep Talk Squad,” a performance piece in which they wore matching red track jackets and offered words of encouragement to strangers, and a series of photographs created by asking strangers in the Mission to pose in any way they wanted.
“I would have done anything Susan asked me to,” Amini said. “I feel like I got to be in the side car.”
Leah Rosenberg was another of O’Malley’s collaborators, working together on shows at the Montalvo Art Center and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Rosenberg’s 2021 SFMOMA mural Getting Better Everyday a Color included O’Malley’s list of healing exercises created for the Montalvo exhibition.
“Her art was sincere,” Rosenberg said. “It came from a place of wanting to answer these questions for herself. She knew that the answers were in the art.”
After O’Malley passed away in 2015, at the age of 38, the stewardship of her work fell to Amini, who still oversees the estate with O’Malley’s husband Tim Caro-Bruce.
“It made me feel closer to Susan to take care of this piece of her life,” Amini said. “It was something I could do with my grief to extend and expand her legacy. I had no idea how enduring and how big it would become.”
In 2016, her work was featured as part of the ongoing Art on Market Street series, which places artwork in MUNI kiosks, featuring uplifting slogans such as “Do things that matter to your heart” and “You are smarter and stronger than you realize” and the titular “It will be more beautiful than you could ever imagine.” In 2022 and 2023, her posters were also displayed at mural-scale in SFMOMA’s Howard Street atrium.
“A sense of possibility has always been part of the Bay Area’s DNA, and certainly courses through O’Malley’s work in her messages to the masses, and to other artists, for whom she is a source of inspiration,” said SFMOMA’s chief curator Janet Bishop.
In 2015, SFMOMA acquired a number of O’Malley’s prints, followed by subsequent acquisitions in 2021 and 2022, including the brochures for the “Pep Talk Squad" project she and Amini made in a San Francisco Kinkos. Her work has been exhibited multiple times at the museum between 2021 and 2024.
“It is almost uncanny how applicable O’Malley’s work feels no matter when one encounters it,” Bishop said. “The wisdom she imparts so succinctly and directly transcends specifics of time and place.”
The October 8 event at the museum, which is free to attend, will be approachable and fun, according to Amini, featuring some videos of Susan’s work, and maybe even an interactive activity. It is intended to be as much a celebration of O’Malley’s life as her work.
“It’s not a memorial,” Rosenberg said. “It’s a way of saying, ‘Look at what Susan did, look at where we are and look at all of the ways that she’s still here.’”
