It’s impossible to describe Susan Cianciolo’s work with just one word. For more than 30 years she has straddled the worlds of art and fashion – an ideal ambassador for both because she squarely belongs to neither. 

Cianciolo is perhaps best known for her New York City–based label RUN, for which she produced 11 collections of tenderly handmade clothing between 1995 and 2001. She became a beloved figure of the city’s avant-garde art world and amassed a cultlike following thanks, in no small part, to the collaborative ethos of the project. She led sewing circles that brought friends (like the artist Rita Ackermann) into the creation process. She made DIY kits so people could create their own versions of her skirts and tops. And her first show in 1995 was staged not on a typical runway but at Andrea Rosen Gallery. 

Her artistic proclivities, however, extend far beyond making clothes. Cianciolo is an illustrator, performer, healer, painter, filmmaker, collagist, cook, teacher, model, and mother. She uses repurposed materials, often working on a shoestring budget, to create something that is far greater than the sum of its humble parts. She has exhibited in abandoned storefronts, under bridges, in galleries from Los Angeles to London, and at the Whitney Biennial and MoMA PS1.

This June, she will add Art Basel to the list, as she is one of three artists, alongside Lynn Hershman Leeson and Kate Mosher Hall, whose work Hoffman Donahue will present in their booth ‘Refracted Realities’, which explores the feminist approaches to collage, craft, and technology of these intergenerational talents. 

Cianciolo’s contributions to ‘Refracted Realities’ will mix old and new work, in an apt summation of her overall practice – of her whole life story, even. ‘I’m always so excited for the new, but then bringing in the older work helps me reflect,’ the artist says.

The first component will be the screening of raw footage from an installation she did in 1999 for Creative Time in the cavernous Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage. (Reviewing the original show for The New York Times, critic Roberta Smith described Cianciolo’s presentation of old designs, drawings, scrapbooks, and footage of archival runway shows as ‘sublime.’)

At the suggestion of gallerist Bridget Donahue – and as Cianciolo notes, ‘Everything I’m doing is completely in collaboration with Bridget,’ – the footage of that presentation was digitized, and they realized that even unedited, it was interesting as an art piece in its own right. ‘It feels so epic to remember installing in that space,’ says Cianciolo. ‘It was just raw and really incredible.’

The footage will be screened at Art Basel on four monitors, two of which will be covered in a colorful patchwork of textiles, including fabric by her friend Konrad Huber. This is classic Cianciolo: bringing in dear collaborators and adding a handmade, cozy touch. 

The second component will be a dollhouse, originally made by Cianciolo’s mother and grandfather when the artist was a young girl growing up in Rhode Island. She’s making her own updates for 2026: ‘I’ve gone in there and created tapestries and little performance spaces and all kinds of tiny little artworks,’ says Cianciolo. 

Her itty-bitty creations for the dollhouse echo the work that originally went into it. ‘I remember my mom said, “Your grandfather was swearing in Italian for months,”’ Cianciolo tells me with a gentle laugh. They made each component, from the roof shingles to the tiny dressers, painstakingly by hand, using the materials that were available to them at little or no cost. That could just as well describe RUN, or any number of Cianciolo’s projects. How she works, she says, ‘is just from the way I grew up.’

The final piece for Art Basel will be new DIY kits, harkening back to an important aspect of her practice she first developed for RUN 6. (Cianciolo’s RUN collections were numbered sequentially, rather than with fashion seasons.) These new kits will be bigger – in repurposed dresser drawers Cianciolo has painted with her daughter, Lilac (a frequent collaborator), instead of the smaller recycled cardboard boxes that historically have housed them. Inside, Cianciolo is placing full outfits – shoes she made for a 1990s RUN collection, formal dresses, tapestries, or paintings. ‘I want each outfit to be completely wearable, even if some are very abstract.’ 

Though all three elements – the film, the dollhouse, and the kits – have roots in past work, mere reprisals these are not. ‘What I do now, it just cannot be what it was, or who I was. So, I don’t try to push myself to recreate or be that person,’ she explains. ‘Maybe that’s how the old work and the new work comes together.’ 

Cianciolo was born in 1969 in Cranston, Rhode Island, a small city just outside Providence. She comes from an Italian–American family of shellfishermen. Her parents split up when she was young, and her father moved to Maine. In Cranston she lived with her mother and grandfather, an avid gardener. ‘You would go into the basement, and everything was jarred for the winter,’ Cianciolo says. She has memories of slicing tomatoes for sandwiches, the ingredients all homemade or homegrown.

Visiting her dad in Maine offered other important lessons. ‘Being in the middle of nowhere with nothing, in the ’70s, in the woods – that built my connection with nature, which is really everything to me,’ she says. 

Cianciolo’s family knitted and crocheted and sewed everything, from clothing to curtains to bedspreads, mostly out of financial constraint but also out of care for objects and materials. ‘I felt like we were different, and I could be embarrassed at times, but I can’t dream up a better way of being taught to do what I know now with my handwork or cooking.’

She moved to New York City in 1987, when she was 17, to attend Parsons. ‘My family said, “Well, you can’t be an artist. You have to learn a trade. We’ll let you study fashion,” because they thought that was practical.’ But fashion school wasn’t the best fit; the technical aspects of patternmaking and sewing were challenging. ‘I started to see, “Oh, I have a heavier hand, I’m more abstract.” It was very hard for me,’ she says. 

But an important skill she took away from Parsons was fashion illustration, which she excelled at, and which she parlayed into a job at Geoffrey Beene. She also worked for Badgley Mischka and X-girl, Kim Gordon and Daisy von Furth’s streetwear brand, before starting RUN. 

Performance has also been an indelible part of Cianciolo’s creative life. She staged RUN Restaurant in 2001 in Alleged Gallery, which was owned by her former husband, Aaron Rose. It was an act of bringing people together – a performance of care. It served as RUN’s final collection. 

With her daughter she now runs community workshops. She cooks a meal, leads a guided meditation, and then instructs on one topic or another. She and Lilac have been invited to host these workshops all over the world, including, recently, in India. Cianciolo loves doing them, noting, ‘I look at those workshops as a performance, I realized.’ 

On top of her artistic practice and raising her daughter, Cianciolo also models, which she’s done for kindred brands like Eckhaus Latta and Maryam Nassir Zadeh; teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn; and practices daily meditation and healing work. I asked Cianciolo if having such a multidimensional life, with all these interests, somehow tied into the way her work is also so cross-disciplinary. 

‘Maybe there are never clear answers or a way of figuring it out, and perhaps I’m not supposed to,’ she says. The in-betweenness is the point. To subvert expectations of what art is, of what fashion is, of what performance is – maybe that’s the whole game. 

‘I stop and realize that is actually where I’m supposed to be. There’s no “Where are we going?” or “Where are we supposed to be getting to?” It’s like, “Oh, I’m there.”’