Sarah Crowner »Coastal«

Traversing the fields of the applied and fine arts, she maintains an approach to image-making guided by experimentation, immediacy, and spontaneity. Using the process-based logic of collage, Crowner carefully builds her paintings by rearranging and sewing painted and raw panels of cut and shaped canvas, thus connecting painting with the physical and the corporeal. She has often installed them as backdrops or props for performances or placed them alongside tiled floors and platforms, thus opening up the paintings to their environment and finding ways of integrating time and motion into the medium of painting. Crowner’s most recent such collaboration on Pam Tanowitz’s new dance, "Pastoral", together with the composer Caroline Shaw, at the Fisher Center at Bard College in June 2025 received great acclaim.

Architecture, fashion, nature, art history, are all subject to Crowner’s taxonomic process from which magnified details emerge to populate her sewn canvases with the same impetus as the first flowers of spring. In her solemn attentiveness, Crowner takes apart the physical world around her and studies its parts in depth, in a pursuit of understanding what makes it tick; all the while teaching us to appreciate abstraction as craft and nature as technique.