Membership Edition: Sarah McEneaney, Chinati Night, 2020
Archival pigment print.
Sheet: 18 x 24 inches. Image: 18 x 12 7/8 inches.
Paper: Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Bright White
Printer: Keith Yahrling, Master Printer & Lab Manager, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center
Edition of 100 + 10 APs
Sarah McEneaney has created a limited edition print for Chinati members.
What is depicted in this nocturne is as familiar to friends of Chinati, as Sarah McEneaney’s person is to fans of her art. That’s her standing outside one of the artillery sheds, drawing Donald Judd’s mill aluminum boxes by the glow of West Texas starlight. A miniaturist, focused on the most intimate of subjects, McEneaney is rarely outside of the frame of her art, which over the years appears as the visual diary of a life led by an extremely disciplined, politically engaged individual who is aging.
A contemporary painter, McEneaney originally worked for many years in the anachronistic medium of egg tempera. Traditionally associated with European manuscript illumination and Indian miniatures, tempera enjoyed a brief modern moment amidst the American Social Realists during the 1930s.
Chinati Night is a digital print, based on the eponymous egg tempera painting McEneaney made as an artist in residence in 2009. The painting was part of an exhibition of works McEneaney made during her residency—showing her reading in the Chinati library, puttering around the studio, napping—that was held at the Locker Plant. The painting also appears on the cover of volume 14 of the Chinati newsletter.
McEneaney was at the fore of a civic movement that transformed her industrial Philadelphia neighborhood, by turning the abandoned elevated railway line into the Rail Park, a public green space not unlike the High Line in New York. And though her narrative painting could not be more unlike Donald Judd’s specific objects, there is a sense of democracy and reverence for nature underlying both artists’ work.
Join or renew your upper-level membership today to receive this edition.
Sarah McEneaney
McEneaney is a Philadelphia based painter. Born in Munich, Germany, McEneaney graduated in 1979 from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Her 2004 survey at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, was organized by Chinati curator Ingrid Schaffner. McEneaney’s work is represented by Tibor De Nagy Gallery and Locks Gallery. While her most recently awarded artist residency, at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre/ Annaghmakerrig in Ireland, is temporarily postponed, McEneaney is at work with the Brodsky Center on a handmade paper relief edition of her dog Mango.
Past membership editions can be found here.