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Project Collaborator

Sara Black

Associate Professor and Chair of Sculpture School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Biography

Sara Black has worked broadly as an artist, artist-teacher, arts organizer, and curator. Her artwork uses conscious processes of building, craft, and/or material transformation as a time-based method; she uses diseased wood, ecosystem-specific trees, inherited building materials or other exhausted objects as material; and she creates works that expose the complex ways in which things and people are suspended in worlds together, often generating forms that push beyond human frames of reference. Sara is currently collaborating with Amber Ginsburg as a member of Deep Time Chicago and Project Fielding. Sara received her MFA from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago in 2006, acted as the director of the arts division at Antioch College from 2010 to 2014 and is currently Associate Professor and Chair of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in a variety of spaces including Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, Gallery 400, the Hyde Park Art Center, Threewalls SOLO, Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft, New York’s Park Avenue Armory and Eyebeam, Boston’s Tuft University Gallery, Minneapolis’ Soap Factory, the Wormfarm Institute, and the Thailand Biennial.

Featured Project

Projects

Untidy Objects

Untidy Objects

A “living sculpture” on the University’s campus that includes water and vegetation is also a social intervention, prompting viewers to consider the fact that humans are the only living organism with legal and political rights. This project will introduce “augmented reality” technology to the...
Untidy Objects, which introduces emergent growth and multispecies co-mingling, is both a sculptural and political proposition. Since the advent of this multi-year installation, a living sculpture adjacent to the Logan Center developed in conjunction with the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, the ...