The Museum of Contemporary Art Hosts Professor Sarah Sze in Virtual Studio Series

Professor Sarah Sze was recently featured in The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles’ Virtual Studio Visits series. 

Sze was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 and a Radcliffe Fellowship in 2005. In 2013, she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. Her work is exhibited in museums worldwide and held in the permanent collections of prominent institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Tate Modern. Sze's many public works include permanent works for the Seattle Opera House, The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York, and LaGuardia Airport in New York. She received her BFA from Yale University (1991) and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts (1997). 

As noted in her artist statement, “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, 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.”

Led by MOCA Director Klaus Biesenbach, the Virtual Studio Visits series follows Biesenbach as he digitally connects with artists around the world. The series presents a unique opportunity for audiences to connect with artists during what has been an isolating time for so many. Despite this, Sze shared that her studio life has been very productive.

“I have a great team, and we’ve worked really hard to do a very intense schedule of deadlines that didn’t change,” Sze said. “Some of them did change, some of them were moved, and I just really felt like part of my responsibility as an artist through the pandemic was to just keep working and to take in everything, all of the emotions of the pandemic, and try and act as a conduit to put them into the work. Obviously, the conditions of the world have been incredibly tragic, so that’s part of the condition of making the work, but I’ve been working and kept powering through it.”

Art has been an essential part of Sze’s life since childhood. Sze even shared that her family often called her an artist before she even knew how to say her own name. As a child, Sze was constantly drawing or making things, always exploring the act of creation. However, the identity of ‘artist’ wasn’t one that Sze adopted immediately. “My reaction was to rebel against it,” Sze said. “I continued [to make art], but I always thought that since everyone told me I’m an artist, I’m going to try and figure out how to diversify my interests and not feel like that label will always be with me. Over time, I realized that when I didn’t do art, I felt almost a physical sense of loss.”

For Sze, making art is an essential part of her daily life, and she credits her work for helping her cope with the difficulties of the pandemic. Biesenbach also shared how, for him, studio visits like this event with Sze have helped so much, for he finds that “artists have had a very inspiring, and, in the end, encouraging way, of dealing with these difficult times.”

The event also featured a slideshow of Sze’s work that audiences could view throughout Biesenbach and Sze’s conversation. The first piece they shared was a photograph of one of Sze’s earlier paintings, which she completed at age sixteen. The untitled piece, which has never been shown outside of the Sze family house, was interesting for Sze to return to: “Looking at it, I had this intense relationship to that moment of painting [my friend]. For me, it was interesting because the paintings were really about intimacy and about my connection with someone I knew very intimately, and having that intensity between the subject and the painter, and having the viewer caught in that moment. I think that’s still true for me.”

As Biesenbach noted during their conversation, not only has Sze continued to work on her own projects throughout the pandemic, but she has also been teaching in-person for the Columbia University School of the Arts Visual Arts Program. “With art, I think great artists rarely really know, fully, if they’ve made a great work of art. But when you teach somebody, you really have a sense of giving something to them in that moment. I think teaching is a service and one of the highest services that you can give back to a younger generation.”

Check out the complete conversation here.