Please join us for an art talk with Sarah Sense.

Sarah Sense creates photo-weavings with traditional Chitmacha and Choctaw
techniques, her photography, and found imagery. Sense is from Sacramento,
California and currently lives in Bristol, England. She received a BFA from
California State University Chico (2003), and a MFA from Parsons the New
School for Design, New York (2005). Sense was the curator/director of the
American Indian Community House Gallery (2005-07) and catalogued the
gallery’s history. This inspired her search for Indigenous international art, leading
to life abroad when she moved to South America (2010) to research her first
international project, Weaving the Americas, A Search for Native Art in the
Western Hemisphere, a project which included over sixty interviews with
Indigenous artists from twelve countries debuting in Valdivia, Chile
(2011). Weaving Water, explores Indigenous art in the Caribbean and Southeast
Asia, debuting in Bristol, England (2013). While residing in Ireland, Sense
made Grandmother’s Stories (2015), a collaboration with her Choctaw
Grandmother and the history of the Choctaw making a significant financial gift to
the Irish during the famine after suffering the Trail of Tears. Remember (2016) is
inspired by motherhood, Irish landscapes and German family archives to reveal
the complexities of forced and voluntary migration between Europe and the
Americas. Her current work revisits the Chitimacha landscape
with Cypress (2017) and again in Cowgirls and Indian Princesses (2018) which
entangles a fifteen-year image collection of Hollywood posters, personas and
childhood family photos with guns. Current research is on Native North American
histories in England which will be explored with her first permanent installation in
Plymouth, England (2020).
International artist residencies have been a major part of her studio practice and
include: Smithsonian Artist Fellowship for the Chitimacha Reservation; Banff
Centre, Canada; Arizona State University; Santa Rosa Factoría de Arte,
Santiago, Chile; Rainmaker Gallery, Bristol, England. Collections include:
Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, North Carolina; Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana
Museum, Charenton, Louisiana; Choctaw Headquarters, Cypress Bayou Casino,
Charenton, Louisiana; de saisset Museum Santa Clara University, Eaton,
Corporate Collection, Cleveland, Ohio; Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares,
Mexico City, Mexico; Smithsonian National Museum of the America Indian, New
York, New York; Schingoethe Center of Aurora University, Aurora, Illinois; Tweed
Museum of Art, University of Minnesota, Duluth, Minnesota, University of Kansas
Hospital, Kansas City Weltkulturen Museum (World Cultures Museum), Frankfurt,
Germany. Private collections: Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, England,
France, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States of
America