Sarah Charlesworth

(American, 1947–2013)

Sarah Charlesworth was an American Conceptual artist known for photographic series such as Objects of Desire (1983–1988), which explored culture and semiotics through juxtaposing preexisting images. “To live in a world of photographs is to live in a world of substitutes—or so it seems, whose actual referent is always the other, the described, the reality of a world once removed,” she once said. Born on March 29, 1947 in East Orange, NJ, she went on to receive a BA from Barnard College in 1969 and briefly studied photography under Lisette Model. In 1975, Charlesworth and Joseph Kosuth founded The Fox, a magazine dedicated to art theory, she was also involved in formation of BOMB magazine in 1981. Throughout the 1980s, Charlesworth was closely associated with what became known as the Pictures Generation, alongside Jack Goldstein and Sherrie Levine. The artist died on June 25, 2013 in Falls Village, CT. In 2015, the exhibited “Sarah Charlesworth: Double World” opened at the New Museum in New York and later traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.