Sarah Crowner

Sarah Crowner is an abstract painter whose art leaps boldly from wall to floor, to stage, to swimming pool, to tabletop. Color is a material, literally, for her canvases that are composed of cutout shapes of hand-dyed fabric, seamlessly stitched together, then stretched on a frame. Crowner originally studied ceramics and has realized a number of architecturally-scaled projects using glazed tile as a painting medium. She approached an exhibition at Casa Franco, a house by Luis Barragán in Guadalajara, as an opportunity to be in dialogue with the Mexican modernist’s work. A vibrant conversation was carried from room to room by the tile floor that Crowner designed to hover over the original cement floor, and which she conceived as a painting that people could walk on. In a collaboration with the choreographer Jessica Lang, Crowner created sets and costumes for a new ballet Garden Blue—making a mise-en-scène of abstraction.

Sarah Crowner studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and received her MFA from Hunter College University of New York. A 2020 Rome Prize Fellow, she participated in the 57th Carnegie International (organized by Chinati’s curator, Ingrid Schaffner) and is currently preparing a solo exhibition with Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico, for 2022.