Sarah Charlesworth facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Sarah Charlesworth
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| Born |
Sarah Edwards Charlesworth
March 29, 1947 East Orange, New Jersey, U.S.
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| Died | June 25, 2013 (aged 66) Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.
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| Education | Bradford College and Barnard College |
| Known for | Conceptual art |
| Spouse(s) |
Amos Poe
(m. 1983–2010) |
| Awards | John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award, Visual Art (1995) |
Sarah Edwards Charlesworth (born March 29, 1947 – died June 25, 2013) was an American artist. She was known for her unique way of using photographs in her art. Sarah was part of a group of artists called The Pictures Generation. This group worked in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They all explored how pictures and images influence our daily lives and the world around us.
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Early Life and Learning
Sarah Charlesworth was born in East Orange, New Jersey. She went to Barnard College and earned her degree in 1969. For her final project in college, she created a series of 50 photos of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. This project had no words, only pictures. Before Barnard, she studied with Douglas Huebler at Bradford College. After college, she also learned from the famous photographer Lisette Model. Sarah then worked as a freelance photographer and became involved in the art scene in downtown Manhattan.
Family Life
Sarah Charlesworth had two children with her former husband, the filmmaker Amos Poe. Their children are Nicholas T. Poe (born in 1985) and Sarah-Lucy C. Poe (born in 1988).
How Sarah Charlesworth Created Art
Sarah Charlesworth often worked in series, meaning she would explore one idea through many different artworks. Even though she used photographs, she didn't always think of herself as a photographer. She saw her art as a way to ask questions about the world and her place in it. She realized that for many years, she had been using photography to explore these big questions.
In 1975, Sarah helped start a magazine called The Fox. It was about art ideas, but it only lasted for about a year. Later, in 1981, she also helped create BOMB magazine. She even designed the cover for the very first issue of BOMB.
Exploring News and Images
For a series called Modern History (1977–1979), Sarah took pictures of the front pages of 29 newspapers from the United States and Canada. She then removed everything from the pages except for the photographs and the newspaper names.
In another part of this series, called Movie-Television-News-History (1979), she focused on one specific event. This was the shooting of American journalist Bill Stewart in Nicaragua. Sarah showed how this event was reported in 27 different American newspapers on June 21, 1979. All the images in her final artwork were printed the same size as the original newspapers.
The Stills Series
In 1980, Sarah Charlesworth created a powerful series called Stills. These were large photographs, about six and a half feet tall, showing people falling from buildings. When these works were first shown, there were seven images. Sarah would take existing photographs, often from newspapers or magazines. She would then crop or tear them, making them look like they were torn clippings. After that, she would re-photograph the image and make it much larger.
She later added more works to the Stills series. In 2009, she printed an eighth work from her original pictures. The Art Institute of Chicago also asked her to create six new ones from her original film negatives that had never been printed before. Each of these new prints was made to look exactly like the ones she created in 1980.
Objects of Desire
In her "Objects of Desire" series (1983–1988), Sarah used a special printing process called Cibachrome. She took cutout pictures of single objects, like a gold bowl or a statue of a Buddha. She then photographed these objects against bright, colorful backgrounds. The frames of these artworks were also brightly colored to match the backgrounds.
Later Works and Teaching
In the early 1990s, Sarah Charlesworth started to photograph real objects instead of just pictures of objects. Her series The Academy of Secrets tried to show her feelings by using abstract images of objects that had special meanings. In her 2012 exhibition Available Light, she explored how light falling on objects changes how we see them.
Sarah also taught art at several universities, including New York University, the School of Visual Arts, and Hartford University. She was a big influence on many younger artists. In 2012, she joined the faculty at Princeton University.
Death
Sarah Charlesworth lived and worked in both New York City and Falls Village, Connecticut. She passed away on June 25, 2013, at the age of 66, due to a brain aneurysm.
Art Shows and Exhibitions
Sarah Charlesworth's art was shown in more than 40 solo exhibitions. These included shows at the Centre d'art contemporain in Geneva (1977), the Queens Museum of Art in New York (1992), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2014). A big show of her work in 1998, organized by SITE Santa Fe, traveled to four other museums. Her art was also part of important shows like the Whitney Biennial (1985) and the Venice Biennale (1986). In 1995, she helped organize an exhibition called Somatogenies at Artists Space in New York, along with artists Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons.
Where Her Art Can Be Found
Sarah Charlesworth's artwork is kept in many museums around the world. Some of these include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her art is also in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In 2012, the Art Institute of Chicago bought her complete Stills series (14 photographs). That same year, the Museum of Modern Art acquired her 27-photo piece Movie-Television-News-History (1979). Her work is also part of many university art collections, such as the Princeton University Art Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery.
Awards and Recognition
Sarah Charlesworth received several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (in 1976, 1980, and 1983). She also received an award from the New York State Creative Artists Public Service (1977) and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Visual Art (1995).
Images for kids
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Sarah Charlesworth
See also
In Spanish: Sarah Charlesworth para niños
