Sarah Crowner

Sarah Crowner (b. 1974, Philadelphia) makes paintings, ceramics, sculptures, installations, and theater sets. Her large-scale sewn canvases display a fluency in mid-twentieth-century art, artists, and architecture, with a particular regard for geometric abstraction and color field compositions. Crowner’s rigorous practice has long engaged thematic research with an abiding interest in materials, craft, and their histories and processes. Architecture and space are as significant to Crowner’s practice as painting. Her tiled platforms, stone sculptures, and site-specific wall pieces transform spaces into three-dimensional experiences in which the viewer processes the environment as one artwork. Her patterns create an entryway between the art object and the context, enabling the viewer to step inside her work. Crowner has also created set designs for dance and theatrical performance, further underscoring her desire and ability to envelop the viewer in her vision and blur distinctions between various media and scales.

Crowner earned a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1996 and an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York in 2002. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St Louis, MO (2023); Hill Art Foundation, New York, NY (2023); Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2022); Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2022); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2016), and many group shows. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.