She is currently an Assistant Professor of Drawing at the College of Charleston.  She has taught drawing and painting at Dickinson College, Assumption College, Gettysburg College, University of Hawaii, Wesleyan University and University of Connecticut.  Her exhibition background includes solo exhibitions at the Honolulu Contemporary Museum, College of Charleston’s Halsey Gallery, Franklin and Marshall University, Gettysburg College and invitational and group shows in NYC and Washington D.C.  Sara lectures nationally on her work.

Sara received Research and Development Grants from the College of Charleston in 2004 and 2007, Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Individual Fellowships in 1996 and 2000, a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship in1991 and a Massachusetts Arts Lottery Grant in 1984.       

Artist's Statement

In the spring of 2004, I discovered my 8-year-old child sleeping soundly and peacefully in the bathtub.  Afterwards I was inspired to begin painting people floating in water. The visual and metaphoric possibilities that water presented proved to be extremely rich and compelling. It is fluid and moving and also passive and still; figures and objects are at rest or vulnerable as they hover and suspend, floating or drowning. There's the duality of the literal, knowable above the surface and the unknown, with distortion and chance for danger lurking, down below. These simultaneous ambiguities have always been what I've searched for in my picture/narratives. In more recent works, the water has evolved into a kind of stage or platform on which I play out and observe how human gesture, combined with issues of gender and context, conveys and confuses meaning between groups and individuals. Again, the properties of water give urgency and edginess to the relationships I stage in the works. The fictional people and their thoughts are connected in, and to, the common, primordial and intimate space of the water.