Growing up in Shaker Heights, Susan Braham Koletsky benefitted from an impassioned art teacher who revealed the power of art and the impact it could have educationally on young people. Combining the two served as the driving force in her chosen career in the arts, especially once she became Museum Director of The Temple-Tifereth Israel in Beachwood.
“I enjoyed being able to draw and paint, express myself with color and line, use my imagination, and tell a story,” she recalls of her obvious artistic prowess in first grade and beyond. “When you are young, it’s important for an adult to acknowledge and affirm what you’ve created and take time to talk to you about it and make a connection with what you are trying to express.”
When she got to high school, Susan started teaching children’s classes and doing tours for families on weekends through the Education Department at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where she had taken Saturday classes as a child. She had a grant to walk through the galleries with children to identify different lines in paintings, sculptures, mummy cases or suits of armor in the Armor Court and write stories about what they saw, which she turned into a book called Line Find: A Guide to the Galleries for Children.
After her freshman year at the University of Rochester, Susan transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design to pursue a professional art degree. In the summers, her love for CMA kept her coming back to teach and guide tours for families.
After earning her BFA degree at RISD in 1976, Susan returned to Cleveland and worked full-time at CMA until she took a job as Director of Education at the Brockton Art Museum (now the Fuller Craft Museum) in Brockton, MA. It was a small museum but it had excellent exhibitions of arts and crafts and many programs for children.
“Even then I was interested in the artists and having them come in and talk to people,” recalls Susan, whose monthly “Arts Talks” with artists that she launched as the Museum Director of The Temple-Tifereth Israel have been immensely popular. “So I’ve always wanted to connect people to artists and to what is happening in the world at the time.”
In the early ‘80s, Susan directed an extremely successful open-studio event in Boston for The Artists Foundation that featured more than 600 artists who opened their studios in warehouse spaces or galleries to the public. When she returned to Cleveland in 1983, she worked for the New Organization for the Visual Arts and directed a similar 10-day open-studio event, Art Week Cleveland, with nearly 400 artists and all of the city’s galleries participating.
Because her children were still young, she volunteered at The Temple Museum when it was still located in University Circle. In 1997, Susan assumed her current position and began to focus on doing more to feature the museum’s extensive collection of more than 2000 historical and art objects that it had collected since Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver founded the institution in 1950.
Over her 25-year tenure as the Museum Director, Susan curated more than 96 exhibitions and provided related programming and brought to bear her considerable talents as an artist, educator and advocate. As a result of her leadership she has brought a relatively unknown collection of Judaica to a position of prominence within the North American Jewish Art realm. Susan has engaged both Jews and non-Jews in robust conversations about Judaism, anti-Semitism and social responsibility.
“Sue’s vitality and energy have fueled her personal vision that art – as a tool to educate – can enrich our understanding of ourselves and our world, inspire some of us to create art and benefit the wellbeing of our community,” says Margie Moskovitz who worked closely with Sue as the chairperson of the volunteer Temple Museum Committee for The Temple Museum of Jewish Art, Religion and Culture from 2017-2022. “She has the enviable gift of ‘discovering’ area artists to exhibit their work and of facilitating outstanding additions to our collection. “
Susan’s exhibits from the museum’s collection have ranged from displaying “Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20h Century” by Andy Warhol and Judith Weinshall Liberman’s powerful Holocaust Wall Hangings to colorful and decorative Torah mantles to the vibrant and fun exhibit of the shoes of Israeli artist Kobi Levi. She also curated the Maltz Museum’s Judaica gallery from The Temple-Tifereth Israel’s collection.
“I’ve worked with a wide variety of incredibly creative artists, some who have poured their hearts out trying to express their feelings and questions about the Holocaust. We’ve created beautiful objects for our congregation, and exhibited historic pieces from Europe that were meaningful. My joy is to share Jewish art, history and culture and to begin conversations,” Susan concludes.