Sara Garden Armstrong: Threads and Layers
October 16 - December 31, 2020
Threads and Layers surveys works by Alabama native Sara Garden Armstrong, representing an artistic legacy in Alabama and New York spanning six decades. This exhibition brings together handmade artist books, paintings, sculpture, and mechanical, light- and sound-based installations from the 1970s to the 2000s, as well as recent works covering Armstrong’s artistic production up to the present day. Many of these works have never been presented together before. Armstrong’s continuing practice interprets life cycles and metamorphosis using movement, color, sound, texture, and light.
Armstrong has exhibited nationally and internationally since the 1970s. She has had solo exhibitions at John Gibson Gallery, Dieu Donné, Souyun Yi Gallery, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York; and the Birmingham Museum of Art, Maralyn Wilson Gallery, Space One Eleven, and the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham, Ala. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at A.I.R. Gallery and SculptureCenter, New York; Susan Hensel Gallery, Minneapolis; U.S. Embassy, Czech Republic, Prague; Stiftung für Konkrete Kunst, Reutlingen, Germany; Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, Wash.; and the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach.
Her artist books and artworks are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Time, Inc., New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Bibliothèque Nationale and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Ala.; and many others. Her atrium sculptures are included in the collections at the Civitan International Research Center at the University of Alabama-Birmingham and United Therapeutic Corporation, Silver Spring, Md. Armstrong now lives and works in Birmingham, where she founded the cooperative art gallery Ground Floor Contemporary</span . The monograph Sara Garden Armstrong: Threads and Layers will be published this fall. Learn more at: saragardenarmstrong.com.
The exhibition is guest-curated by Paul Barrett, who organized Sara Garden Armstrong: Threads and Layers at the University of Alabama Gallery and the Arts Council Gallery in the Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center in Tuscaloosa. Barrett represented Armstrong’s artist books at the art gallery AGNES in Birmingham in the 1990s.