Susan Phipps Cochran

Susan Phipps Cochran was educated in Switzerland, is a great‐granddaughter of the late Henry Phipps, a partner of Andrew Carnegie in the steel business, and a descendant of W. R. Grace, twice Mayor of New York and founder of W. R. Grace & Co. Her 1960 marriage to John Cochran ended in divorce. Her father, a noted polo player in the nineteenthirties and forties, devotes himself to the family's realestate interests and is a director of W. R. Grace. Susan Phipps Cochran’s passion for the arts, science and the outdoors was nurtured from a very young age. Born in 1940 on Long Island, New York, art, music, sewing and knitting were an integral part of her life – along with adventure on the high seas and in the wilderness. She inherited her appreciation for nature from her father, who taught her to identify a plethora of flora and fauna and had her herding cattle, breaking yearlings, handling reptiles or out fishing, scuba diving, and shooting. At quieter moments, Susan could be found sitting silently by an irrigation ditch or pond on the family ranch in south Florida taking photographs and noting the wildlife that came to drink. Today, she credits her attention to detail and patience to the discipline and focus that was instilled during those early years. While Susan attended schools in Florida, New York, Virginia, Switzerland and France, she fondly recalls three years of art classes in a Virginia boarding school as among the most rewarding. After schooling, her love of following the “path less traveled” led her to participate in expeditions around the world. On one such expedition, she was a member of the dive team that discovered one of the oldest shipwrecks ever found, as chronicled in the May 1960 issue of National Geographic. In 2001 Susan decided to switch to sculpting in bronze when her friend, artist Helmut Koller, asked her to create a chair for a local Hospice fundraising event. A new door opened with her creation of a chair entitled T.H. Smith, a pair of floating overalls. This lead to a series of benches and chairs, one of which, “After the Fire,” honors the firefighters lost on 9/11and is on permanent display at the New York Firemen’s Museum. She considers her best creation, however, to be “my three children.”