My friend Suzi Gablik, who has died aged 87, was an artist and pioneering writer on art who argued from the mid-1980s that the arts needed to turn away from modernism and recognise again the ecological and social function of art. Her writing had a profound impact on the evolution of a vast array of artists, arts collectives, thinkers and ecological activists.
Born in New York, Suzi was the only child of Anthony Gablik, a commercial artist, and Geraldine (nee Schwartz). She attended PS9 school in Manhattan, New York City, then Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a radical arts institution where she found what she called “my people”.
