Sarah Charlesworth | |
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| Born | Sarah Edwards Charlesworth (1947-03-29)March 29, 1947 East Orange, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Died | June 25, 2013(2013-06-25) (aged 66) Hartford, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Education | Bradford College andBarnard College |
| Known for | Conceptual art |
| Spouse | |
| Awards | John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award, Visual Art (1995) |
Sarah Edwards Charlesworth (March 29, 1947 – June 25, 2013) was an Americanconceptual artist and photographer. She is considered part ofThe Pictures Generation, a loose-knit group of artists working in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, all of whom were concerned with how images shape our everyday lives and society as a whole.[1][2]
Charlesworth was born inEast Orange, New Jersey. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree fromBarnard College in 1969. Her undergraduate thesis project, a work of conceptual art devoid of text, was a 50-print study of theSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum.[3] Prior to that she studied underDouglas Huebler at Bradford College.[4] After completing her degree, she studied briefly under the photographerLisette Model atThe New School.[4] After college, she worked as a freelance photographer and became active in downtown Manhattan art circles.[5]
Charlesworth had two children with her former husband, filmmakerAmos Poe; Nicholas T. Poe (b. 1985) and Sarah-Lucy C. Poe (b. 1988).[6]
Charlesworth worked in photographic series, but stated in a 1990 interview that she had not really thought of herself as a photographer.[7] She stated, rather, that she viewed her work as investigating questions about the world and her role in it, but realized as of that point that she had been investigating those questions through the medium of photography for the past twelve years.[7]
In 1975, Charlesworth and fellow conceptual artistsMichael Corris, Preston Heller,Joseph Kosuth, Andrew Menard, and Mel Ramsden foundedThe Fox, a magazine dedicated to art theory, but the magazine only remained in publication until 1976.[4] Along withGlenn O'Brien, Betsy Sussler,Liza Bear, and Michael McClard, she co-foundedBOMB magazine in 1981.[8][9] Charlesworth also created the cover art for the very first edition ofBOMB magazine.[8]
Charlesworth worked in series, exploring one idea to its conclusion.[10] For a series calledModern History (1977–79), she photographed, at actual size, the front pages of 29 American and Canadian newspapers[11] and blanked out everything except for their photographs and mastheads.[6] ForMovie-Television-News-History (1979), a part of the series, Charlesworth selected a specific event – the shooting of American journalistBill Stewart by the NicaraguanNational Guard – and presented it as it was reported on June 21, 1979, in 27 American newspapers. All images in the final work were printed at the same size as the original newspapers.[12]
In February 1980, Charlesworth createdStills, a series of harrowing, six-and-a-half-foot-tall photographs depicting bodies falling from buildings.[13] WhenStills was first shown in 1980 inTony Shafrazi's East Village apartment, it consisted of seven images. To create the series, Charlesworth scoured news wires and the archives of theNew York Public Library for images of people plunging through the air, having jumped out of a windows to commit suicide or because of a catastrophe like fire. After appropriating the photograph, she would crop or tear it, often leaving the edges ragged so that it appeared to be haphazardly torn like a homemade clipping. She would then rephotograph the image and enlarge it. Charlesworth later expanded the series, printing an eighth work from her original source material in 2009 and – as a commission of theArt Institute of Chicago – creating a set of six new ones from the original transparencies that were never printed. Each gelatin silver print was made and mounted to the exact specifications of those she created in 1980.[14]
In her "Objects of Desire" series (1983–1988),Cibachrome prints of appropriated images – typically a cutout picture of a single object, including a gold bowl and a statue of aBuddha – are photographed against bright, laminated monochrome backgrounds that match their lacquered frames.[11][15]
In the seriesRenaissance Paintings andRenaissance Drawings (both 1991), Charlesworth combined imagery from disparate Italian Renaissance paintings and drawings to make new, often ironic paintings and drawings.[3]
Charlesworth began to photograph actual objects only in the early 1990s.[6] Her seriesThe Academy of Secrets is Charlesworth's attempt to convey her emotions through using abstracted images of objects that have symbolic associations.[7] She illustrated how the way light falls on objects affects our perceptions of them as the subject of her own 2012 solo exhibitionAvailable Light.[16]
Charlesworth held various teaching positions atNew York University, theSchool of Visual Arts, andHartford University. Before her death she taught Master Critique in the MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Program and The School of Visual Arts. A major influence on a new generation of artists, includingSara VanDerBeek andLiz Deschenes, she was appointed to the faculty ofPrinceton University in 2012.[5][17]
She lived and worked both in New York City and inFalls Village, Connecticut, at the time of her death.[15] Charlesworth died of abrain aneurysm on June 25, 2013, at the age of 66.[6]
Charlesworth's work was the subject of more than 40 solo exhibitions at venues including the Centre d'art contemporain, Geneva (1977), theQueens Museum of Art, New York (1992), and theArt Institute of Chicago (2014).[3] A 1998 survey organized bySITE Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico, toured to four additional museums.[6][13] Her work was included in theWhitney Biennial (1985) and theVenice Biennale (1986). In 1995, she cocuratedSomatogenies at New York'sArtists Space with fellow artistsCindy Sherman andLaurie Simmons.[3]
Charlesworth's work is included in the collections of many museums around the world,[18] including theMetropolitan Museum of Art; theWhitney Museum of American Art: theMuseum of Modern Art; theMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston;Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; theWalker Art Center, Minneapolis;Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida;[19]Brooklyn Museum;Victoria and Albert Museum, London;Israel Museum; and theNational Museum of Women in the Arts, among others.[20] In 2012, theArt Institute of Chicago acquired the complete series (14 photographs) of her over-lifesize seriesStills (1980), and in that year as well, theMuseum of Modern Art acquired her 27-photo pieceMovie-Television-News-History (1979).[5] Her work is also included in many university collections including thePrinceton University Art Museum,Yale University Art Gallery andBerkeley Art Museum.[21]
Charlesworth received several grants from theNational Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1980, 1983) as well as from the New York State Creative Artists Public Service (1977) and theJohn Simon Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Visual Art (1995).
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