Sarah Sze: Recipient of the Meraki Artist Award 2025

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston announced that Sarah Sze is the first recipient of the Meraki Artist Award

The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) announced that Sarah Sze (b. 1969, Boston, MA) is the inaugural recipient of its new Meraki Artist Award. Widely recognized for expanding the boundaries between painting, sculpture, video, and installation, Sarah Sze’s work blends the intimate with the monumental, precision with chaos, and the physical with the digital. Her intimate paintings and large-scale installations and public works challenge perceptions of space, time, and scale, making her one of the most compelling artists of our time.

“It’s a huge honor to be the first recipient of the Meraki Artist Award and I’m inspired by the dedication to love, care, and art that the award stands for,” said Sarah Sze.  

Generously funded by Fotene Demoulas, the $100,000 award celebrates the artistic achievements of women artists and their impact on the field of contemporary visual art. Sarah Sze will accept the Meraki Artist Award at the museum’s annual Women’s Luncheon on May 5, 2025. 

“I am honored to collaborate with the ICA to spotlight the passion and presence that women visual artists bring to their practice through the Meraki Artist Award,” said Fotene Demoulas. “I want to offer heartfelt congratulations to Sarah, whose innovate work inspires us to see the world in new ways.”

“In Greek, the word meraki means to pour your soul into something, and I can think of no better way to describe Fotene’s longstanding support of artists and the ICA,” said Jill Medvedow, Ellen Matilda Poss Director of the ICA. “The generosity of this award is echoed in the open spirit and artistic expansiveness of Sarah’s work. We are thrilled to recognize Sarah as the inaugural recipient of the Meraki Artist Award and to celebrate her important contributions to art and culture.”

An exhibition of works promised to the ICA by Fotene and Tom Coté will go on view at the museum in January 2026. Reflecting their longtime support of artists at every stage of their career through exhibitions, publications, and museum acquisitions, the exhibition features work by 20 artists including Charlene von Heyl, Deana Lawson, Deborah Roberts, Diedrick Brackens, Laura Owens, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Mickalene Thomas, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Olga de Amaral, and Sarah Sze. The artworks reflect multiple generations, styles, media, and thematic concerns, exemplifying a sustained interest in formal and material complexity and a steadfast belief in the singular perspectives that artists contribute to the world.

SARAH SZE BIOGRAPHY 

Sarah Sze gleans objects and images from worlds both physical and digital, assembling them into complex multimedia works that shift scale between microscopic observation and macroscopic perspective on the infinite. A peerless bricoleur, Sarah Sze moves with a light touch across proliferating media. Her dynamic, generative body of work spans sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and installation while always addressing the precarious nature of materiality and grappling with matters of entropy and temporality. 

Born in Boston, Sarah Sze earned a BA from Yale University in 1991 and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1997. While still in graduate school, she challenged the very nature of sculpture, at MoMA PS1 in New York, by burrowing into the walls of the building, creating sculptural portals and crafting ecosystems that radically transformed the host architecture. A year later, for her first solo institutional exhibition, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, she presented Many a Slip (1999), an immersive installation sprawling through several rooms in which flickering projections were scattered among complex assemblages of everyday objects. This marked Sze’s first foray into video, which has since become a central medium of her installations. Citing the Russian Constructivist notion of the “kiosk” as a key inspiration, she conceived subsequent installations as portable stations for the interchange of images and the exchange of information. Sarah Sze represented the United States in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, and her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including recently at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2024); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2023); and Fondation Cartier, Paris (2020), and featured in the Carnegie International (1999); Whitney Biennial (2000); and the Bienal de São Paulo (2002). She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003. 

THE MERAKI ARTIST AWARD  

The Meraki Artist Award is an annual artist award that is a key part of the ICA’s efforts to exhibit, present and collect the work of women artists. The award takes its inspiration from the Greek word “meraki” (may-rah-kee), which means to do something with soul, love, or creativity. The Meraki Artist Award is funded by Fotene Demoulas and will continue to be supported for the next ten years. The artist will be recognized at the ICA’s annual Women’s Luncheon. 

ICA - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART - BOSTON

25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA, 02210

www.icaboston.org

Sarah Sze @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NYC

Sarah Sze
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
September 5 — October 19, 2019

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery presents a solo exhibition with artist Sarah Sze at the gallery’s New York location. This is the artist’s third solo show with the gallery and her first exhibition in New York since 2015.

“In the age of the image, a painting is a sculpture.”
Sarah Sze (2019) 

“After the rupture, after the apocalypse, amid the ruin of cables and wires, someone might ask: what was the purpose of all of those images within and through which we lived?”
Zadie Smith “The Tattered Ruins of the Map” Sarah Sze: Centrifuge (2018)

For more than two decades, Sarah Sze’s work has defied the limitations of artistic media, employing with equal facility sculpture, installation, video, photography, printmaking and painting. Sze has been credited with dismantling and re-envisioning the very potential of objects, simultaneously celebrating the particular relevance of sculpture in contemporary visual culture, while also expanding its definition. However, her focus has been equally tuned to images, considering their materiality, transmutability, and ease of circulation in our increasingly digital existence. Originally trained as a painter, she has consistently looked through the lens of two-dimensionality, including color, line, form and image-making, to consider aspects of sculpture and installation.

Sarah Sze’s latest body of work frays “the seam between the real and the image” (Smith). Through complex constellations of objects and a proliferation of images, Sze expands upon the never- ending stream of visual narratives that we negotiate daily, from magazines and newspapers, television and iPhones, to cyberspace and outer space. The works evoke the generative and recursive process of image-making in a world where consumption and production are more interdependent, where the beginning of one idea is the ending of another—and where sculpture gives rise to images, and images to sculpture.

In this new exhibition, Sarah Sze expands her work by embedding her nuanced sculptural language into the material surfaces of painting and into the digital realm through the interplay of cloth, ink, wood, paper, metal, paint, found objects, light, sound and structural supports—collapsing distinctions between two, three and four dimensions. This body of work fundamentally alters our sense of time, place, and memory by transforming our experiences of the physical world around us. Both objects and images, Sze says, are “ultimately reminders of our own ephemerality”.

The exhibition is immediately visible on the gallery’s exterior storefront windows and fills both floors with an installation that utilizes all media and approaches to art making. On the lower level, the main space is filled with a Plato’s Cave of imagery, entitled Crescent (Timekeeper), which scatters out to the entryway, across the walls and onto floors. An immersive installation of light, sound, film, paintings and objects transforms our sense of materiality and the imaginary. Moving pictures, scenes, and flickering light surround viewers in loops of personal, researched and found scenes. The installation unfolds in fragments: a fire burns, a building collapses, a child sleeps, static image signals or “snow” overtakes a film clip mid-play. Sarah Sze splices together disparate content that viewers, upon moving through the space, edit together through the act of seeing and reading images to create their own narrative content in the work.

This interplay of images and content is juxtaposed on the first floor with a “studio space” filled with paintings and other visual elements, utilized by the artist in the making of the work itself. Here Sarah Sze debuts a layered painting process in which the medium functions as a portal into two- dimensional experimentation in time, space and memory. Traces of image-making techniques fuse and fade: silkscreen prints, collage, photographs and other elements mark the walls, suggesting the generative process of making in innumerable forms and the ways in which an image is burned into memory and unreliably persists, decaying over time.

In two galleries upstairs, painting, video, photography, sculpture likewise morph, with each assuming and absorbing the characteristics of other media and taking on new forms. Painting fills not only walls, but also the floor; paint is converted into a physical route laid on the floor plane and assumes the role of sculptural entity around which viewers maneuver physically. Sarah Sze further generates images of painting, and paintings of images that, in turn, are photographed, printed, recorded, and projected. Her sculpture generates images that are not only used in the paintings, but also fuel the video and installation in an endless feedback loop. Input and output feed the work in ways that confirm that the hierarchies of the originality no longer exist. Taken together, the intermingling of painting, sculpture, photography, video, and architecture become fertile ground for the process of seeing images in time and space—not unlike the way we experience them in the ever shifting, complex, material yet ephemeral world in which we exist.

SARAH SZE’s work has been the subject of major exhibitions worldwide, and in 2003 she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur fellowship. In 2013, she represented the United States at the 55th Venice Biennale with a presentation entitled Triple Point. Her work has also been presented in major solo exhibitions at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2017); Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark (2017); Rose Art Museum, Brandies University, Boston (2016); Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2014); Asia Society, New York (2011- 12); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle, UK (2009); Malmo Konsthall, Malmo, Sweden (2006); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2003); Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2002); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1999); Fondation Cartier, Paris (1999); and the Institute of Contemporary, London (1998).

In October 2019, Sarah Sze’s work will be featured in Surrounds: 11 Installations, a major group exhibition for the re-opening of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In December 2019, Sarah Sze will have a solo exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, France.

Sarah Sze has completed major public commissions for New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s 2nd Avenue subway line, 96th street station (2017), New York City’s High Line Park (2011-12), the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in New York City, organized by the Public Art Fund (2006), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (2004), and most recently for Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington (2019).

Her work is well represented in private and public collections worldwide, including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Philadelphia Museum of Art; 21st Century Museum of Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Walker Art Center Minneapolis; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; National Gallery of Canada; Tate Collection, London; and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY
521 West 21st Street New York, NY 10011
tanyabonakdargallery.com

20th century iconic art works at High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 ›› 2013
High Museum of Art, Atlanta
October 13, 2012 - January 20, 2013

In the exhibition Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 ›› 2013, the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, is explorin the development of modern and contemporary art by selecting key years in art history that represent watershed moments in the 20th century.

ROY LICHTENSTEIN (American, 1923-1997), Girl with Ball, 1961

Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 60¼ x 36¼ inches (153 x 91.9 cm)

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Philip Johnson, 421.1981

The exhibition presents approximately 100 works of art created during the years 1913, 1929, 1950, 1961, and 1988, as well as the art of today.  The exhibition examines the years prior to the start of World War I and the Great Depression, the lead-up to postwar American prosperity and the years preceding the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall and how artists responded to and were influenced by events on the world stage.

The exhibition also presents the works of contemporary artists Aaron Curry, Katharina Grosse, and Sarah Sze, whose work extends themes first explored in the 20th century and updates them for the 21st century.

Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 ›› 2013 is one of the largest surveys of 20th-century art to ever be exhibited in the southeastern United States. Co-organized by the High Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), as part of the two museums’ ongoing collaboration, the exhibition is on view since October 13, 2012, through January 20, 2013.

“These periods of time ushered in new ways of thinking that forever transformed the artistic landscapes,” said Michael E. Shapiro, the High’s Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr., Director. “We’re delighted that this partnership with MoMA will enable our visitors to see how the work of artists from different eras was influenced by major historical events.”

The exhibition includes iconic works from each represented year, including:

· 1913: Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

· 1929: Salvador Dalí’s Surrealist painting Illumined Pleasures

· 1950: Willem de Kooning’s landmark of Abstract Expressionism, Woman, I

· 1961: Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop art masterpiece Girl With Ball  

· 1988: Jeff Koons’s famed porcelain sculpture Pink Panther

Michael Rooks, the High’s Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, has chosen Aaron Curry, Katharina Grosse and Sarah Sze to highlight the art of 2013. Sarah Sze, who will represent the United States in the 2013 Venice Biennale, created a site-specific installation for the High. Aaron Curry debuts three new works—monumental, polychromed steel sculptures titled “Boo,” “Thing” and “Deadhead”—which are installed on the Museum’s lawn. Rounding out the selection, a large three-dimensional painting by Katharina Grosse are on display on the skyway level of the Wieland Pavilion. 

“Aaron Curry, Katharina Grosse, and Sarah Sze are artists who push the boundaries of artistic practice,” said Rooks. “Each is known for their conceptually open-ended and physically immersive works that invite viewers to walk through and around them. In the process of physically exploring these works, viewers draw out the present moment, stretching time toward moments yet to come.”

AARON CURRY (born 1972), on view through May 2013

Originally trained as a painter, Aaron Curry turned to sculpture while he was an undergraduate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he first became interested in the flat planes that characterized the work of David Smith and Isamu Noguchi. Aaron Curry’s interplay between two and three dimensions encourages viewers to walk around his work, creating new lines of sight as planes of color rotate into nothingness. In his own words, his sculptures are “almost like a cubist painting . . . [they] refer to the surface but give you illusion at the same time. It’s an awkward space that I still find rather exciting to play with.” Since earning his M.F.A. from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, he has exhibited in dozens of group shows throughout the United States and Europe as well as solo shows in Los Angeles, Berlin, London and New York. In 2010, Aaron Curry received a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, an experience that culminated in an exhibition at the Schinkel Pavilion in early 2011. His work has been praised by critics Holland Cotter and Roberta Smith, the latter of whom proclaimed Curry’s work to be “physically inventive and sculpturally inclined.”

KATHARINA GROSSE (born 1961), on view through January 20, 2013

The Berlin-based artist Katharina Grosse’s distinctive approach to painting and installation is characterized by the simultaneous expansion and elimination of boundaries for painting, “Abstract Expressionism opened up new ways to look at painting, but it also hindered, to a certain extent, painting’s development. Negating painting’s illusionism narrowed it down to applying paint to a flat surface. I have a totally different approach. I don’t think that a painting is a coherent, closed system that only takes place within its borders.” Her works challenge traditional notions of painting and architectural space and invite viewers to confront their spatial boundaries. Katharina Grosse resists identification with specific media, historical movements or other affiliations, preferring instead to remain as uninhibited as possible. Since 1996 she has exhibited in more than 30 solo shows and several dozen group shows in galleries and museums across the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Tate St. Ives in England, the Museum for New Art in Freiburg, Germany, and Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark (Wanafoto has published a post about this exhibition with pictures of Katharina Grosse artworks). In 2011 she installed her monumental installation “One Floor up More Highly” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, which received critical praise, including the article, “Chromatic Theater,” published in Art in America. In addition to her artistic practice, Katharina Grosse is currently a professor of fine arts at the Arts Academy of Dusseldorf.

SARAH SZE (born 1969), on view through January 20, 2013

Educated at Yale University and the School of Visual Arts, New York, Sarah Sze has emerged as one of the foremost installation artists of her generation. Best known for her elaborate and gravity-defying installations—microcosmic spaces of dizzying complexity—her work often seems to be a three-dimensional collage in which the placement of every object holds meaning both outside the work and within it. Her coupling of familiar objects—towels, chairs, ladders, for exmaple—with ones that are less immediately identifiable provokes the viewer to create rich associations between otherwise unrelated items. Over the last fifteen years, she has shown in group exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Monographic exhibitions of her work have been organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Whitney; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others. Her permanent installations are on display at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkley. Sarah Sze has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the Atelier Calder prize and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, and most recently she has been selected to represent the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale. Sarah Sze lives and works in New York City. 

Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 ›› 2013 continues a multi-year, multi-exhibition collaboration between the High and MoMA, which began in 2009 with “Monet Water Lilies,” the first in a series of six exhibitions, followed by “Modern by Design” in summer 2011 and “Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters,”. The initiative builds on successful past collaborations between the High and MoMA that resulted in four exhibitions presented in Atlanta between 1997 and 2000. This project extends ties between the institutions through professional exchanges, development of educational programs and publications and reciprocal admission benefits. 

This exhibition is organized by Jodi Hauptman, MoMA Curator of Drawings, and Samantha Friedman, MoMA Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Drawings, in collaboration with David Brenneman, the High’s Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Frances B. Bunzl Family Curator of European Art, and Michael Rooks, the High’s Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Fast Forward: Modern Moments 1913 ›› 2013 is accompanied by a fully illustrated 

catalogue.

High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia 30309
Museum's website: www.high.org