Sarah Sze

(American, born 1969)

Sarah Sze is a contemporary American installation artist. Her large-scale sculptures often employs found objects, plants, photographs, wiring, and food detritus. Sze constructs her work by hand, building intricate and often gravity-defying towers that fill entire exhibition spaces. The organic and transitional state of her work suggests something in the process of growth and decay. “I am aware people might dismiss my art, but I'm interested in getting them to stop and look; for no other reason than that is what I do,” she has reflected. Born in 1969 in Boston, MA, she completed her BA in architecture and painting at Yale University before receiving her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1997. Sze is the recipient of the 2003 MacArthur Fellowship, as well as representing the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale with her work Triple Point. In 2017, her mural Blueprint for a Landscape was completed for the 96th Street 2nd avenue subway platform in New York. She currently lives and works with her husband the famed surgeon and writer Siddhartha Mukherjee in New York, NY. Today, Sze’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among others.