Sarah Oppenheimer (born 1972, in Austin, Texas)van Ryzin Jeanne Claire
"UT Landmarks to unveil a new public art commission by Sarah Oppenheimer,"
''Sightlines'', May 14, 2021. Retrieved July 14, 2021. is a New York City-based artist whose projects explore the articulations and experience of built space.Rose, Julian
"Mirror Travel: Julian Rose On Sarah Oppenheimer’s ''W-120301'',"
''Artforum'', April 2013. Retrieved July 15, 2021.Hirsch, Faye. "Sarah Oppenheimer, P.P.O.W.," ''Art in America'', December 2012.Galloway, Alexander
"Sarah Oppenheimer,"
''BOMB''. Fall 2016. Retrieved July 15, 2021. Her work involves precise transformations of architecture that disrupt, subvert or shuffle visitors' visual and bodily experience.Rose, Julian
"Sarah Oppenheimer: S-281913,"
''Artforum'', July 2016. Retrieved July 15, 2021.Crow, Kelly
"A Baltimore Museum Becomes the Art Object,"
''Wall Street Journal'', October 19, 2012. Retrieved July 15, 2021.Kastner, Jeffrey
"Sarah Oppenheimer, P.P.O.W.,"
''Artforum''. November 2012. Retrieved July 15, 2021. ''Artforum'' critic Jeffrey Kastner wrote that Oppenheimer's artworks "typically induce a certain kind of vaguely vertiginous, almost giddy uncertainty" that over time turns "indeterminacies of apprehension into epistemological uncertainties, epistemic puzzlement into ontological perplexity." Oppenheimer's work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Mudam (Luxembourg),MUDAM
Sarah Oppenheimer
Collection. Retrieved July 14, 2021.

Wexner Center for the Arts The Wexner Center for the Arts is the Ohio State University's "multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art." The Wexner Center is a lab and public gallery, but not an art museum, as it doe ...

,Galloway, Alexander. "Our Best Machines Are Made of Sunshine," ''Sarah Oppenheimer: S-337473'', Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2017.

Mass MoCA The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) is a museum in a converted Arnold Print Works factory building complex located in North Adams, Massachusetts. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing ...

,Campanini, Cristiana
"Oppenheimer’s Dancing Sculptures,"
''Arbitare'', April 1, 2020. Retrieved July 15, 2021. Kunstmuseum Thun (Switzerland),Kunstmuseum Thun
Sarah Oppenheimer, ''N-01''
Exhibitions. Retrieved July 22, 2021. and

Baltimore Museum of Art The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) in Baltimore, Maryland, is an art museum that was founded in 1914. The BMA's collection of 95,000 objects encompasses more than 1,000 works by Henri Matisse anchored by the Cone Collection of modern art, ...

. She has received a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

,John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Sarah Oppenheimer
Fellows. Retrieved July 14, 2021. the

Rome Prize The Rome Prize is awarded by the American Academy in Rome, in Rome, Italy. Approximately thirty scholars and artists are selected each year to receive a study fellowship at the academy. Recipients must be American citizens. Prizes have been aw ...

,American Academy in Rome
Sarah Oppenheimer
Prize Fellows. Retrieved July 14, 2021. and awards from the

Joan Mitchell Joan Mitchell (February 12, 1925 – October 30, 1992) was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artis ...

Louis Comfort Tiffany Louis Comfort Tiffany (February 18, 1848 – January 17, 1933) was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is associated with the art nouveauLander, David"The Buyable ...

and

Anonymous Was A Woman "Anonymous Was a Woman" is the fourth episode of the eleventh season of the American police procedural drama ''NCIS'', and the 238th episode overall. It originally aired on CBS in the United States on October 15, 2013. The episode is written b ...

foundations, among others.Joan Mitchell Foundation
Sarah Oppenheimer
Supported Artists. Retrieved July 14, 2021.''Artforum''
"Tiffany Foundation Announces $600,000 in Awards,"
February 4, 2010. Retrieved July 15, 2021.Anonymous was a Woman
Previous Recipients
Retrieved July 14, 2021.

Work and critical reception

Oppenheimer modifies areas of transition such as thresholds, hallways, windows and doors in order to reveal and reshape spatial hierarchies of observation and influence.Rose, Julian
"Sarah Oppenheimer: Perez Art Museum,"
''Artforum'', February 2017. Retrieved July 15, 2021. Critics distinguish her work by its exploration of the performative possibilities of architecture.Stalder, Laurent. "A Switch," ''Sarah Oppenheimer: S-337473'', Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2017. Each project acts as a medium of experiential exchange, leading visitors to reconsider perceptions of orientation, structure and the stability of built space.Green, Tyler. "Baltimore Commissions Sarah Oppenheimer," ''artinfo'', May 18, 2011. Writers relate Oppenheimer's strategies to those of

environmental psychology Environmental psychology is a branch of psychology that explores the relationship between humans and the external world. It examines the way in which the natural environment and our built environments shape us as individuals. Environmental psycho ...

situationist The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution ...

psychogeography Psychogeography is the exploration of urban environments that emphasizes interpersonal connections to places and arbitrary routes. It was developed by members of the Letterist International and Situationist International, which were revolutionar ...

, and to the work of artists such as

Lygia Clark Lygia Pimentel Lins (23 October 1920 – 25 April 1988), better known as Lygia Clark, was a Brazilian artist best known for her painting and Installation art, installation work. She was often associated with the Brazilian Constructivist moveme ...

, Robert Irwin,

Hans Haacke Hans Haacke (born August 12, 1936) is a German-born artist who lives and works in New York City. Haacke is considered a "leading exponent" of institutional critique, and is considered to be the most harsh and consistent critic of museums among t ...

and

Andrea Fraser Andrea Rose Fraser (born 1965) is a performance artist, mainly known for her work in the area of institutional critique. Fraser is based in New York and Los Angeles and is a professor and area head of the Interdisciplinary Studio of the UCLA Scho ...

.Clark; Robin. "Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art,
''Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art''
Robin Clark and Giuliana Bruno, La Jolla, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2009. Retrieved August 6, 2021.Malick, Courtney
"Sarah Oppenheimer’s Unique Brand of Institutional Friction at PAMM,"
''Miami Rail'', Fall 2016. Retrieved July 15, 2021.

Nomenclature

The titles of Oppenheimer’s works are generated from a numerical typology.Amado, Miguel
"Inner and Outer Space,"
''Artforum'', September 12, 2008. Retrieved July 22, 2021. Each digit in a title tracks transactions and flow between spatial zones, and together, form a key to the orientation of the work within the built environment. Writer Alexander Galloway likens Oppenheimer’s typology to bitwise operations commonly used in computer architecture and binary arithmetic.

Projects

In early exhibitions at

The Drawing Center The Drawing Center is a museum and a nonprofit exhibition space in Manhattan, New York City, that focuses on the exhibition of drawings, both historical and contemporary. History The Drawing Center was founded by former assistant curator of dr ...

(2002) and

Queens Museum The Queens Museum (formerly the Queens Museum of Art) is an art museum and educational center at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, New York City, United States. Established in 1972, the museum includes the '' Panorama of the City of New ...

(2004), Oppenheimer explored the interdependence of spatial navigation and interior architecture.The Drawing Center
''Drawing Papers 30: Sarah Oppenheimer and Clarina Bezzola''
2002. Retrieved July 15, 2021.''The New York Times''

April 14, 2003, p. E8. Retrieved August 4, 2021. Mutable wall panels were reconfigured in the museum space while navigational research was conducted on test subjects monitored under controlled conditions (e.g., ''Hallway'', 2002).Meredith, Michael
"Sarah Oppenheimer,"
''Artforum'', September 2002. Retrieved July 22, 2021.Johnson, Ken

''The New York Times'', July 30, 2004. Retrieved July 15, 2021. In the latter 2000s, Oppenheimer reconfigured the boundaries between exhibition spaces, installing apertures that displaced views within and outside galleries (e.g.,

Saint Louis Art Museum The Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) is an art museum located in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. With paintings, sculptures, cultural objects, and ancient masterpieces from around the world, its three-story building stands in Forest Park in ...

, 2008;

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) is an art museum in La Jolla La Jolla ( , ) is a hilly, seaside neighborhood in San Diego, California, occupying of curving coastline along the Pacific Ocean. The population reported in the ...

, 2009).Gay, Malcolm
"Currents 102: Sarah Oppenheimer,"
''Riverfront Times'', April 16, 2008. Retrieved July 14, 2021.Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
Sarah Oppenheimer
Artists. Retrieved July 14, 2021. ''610-3356'' (

Mattress Factory The Mattress Factory is a contemporary art museum located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was a pioneer of site-specific installation art and features permanent installations by artists Yayoi Kusama, James Turrell, and Greer Lankton. The museu ...

, 2008) employed a roughly seven-foot-long hole in museum's fourth floor which tunneled down and out a third-floor window to enable a view outside the building.Mondello, Bob
"Find Unforgettable Art In A Most Unlikely Place: A Pittsburgh Mattress Factory,"
''NPR'', July 21, 2015. Retrieved July 14, 2021.Mattress Factory
''610-3356'', Sarah Oppenheimer
Works. Retrieved July 14, 2021. In ''D-33'' (P.P.O.W., 2012) and ''33-D'' (Kunsthaus Baselland, 2014), Oppenheimer modified the boundary between three contiguous rooms, inserting a pair of slanting openings at the spaces' corners.Smith, Roberta

''The New York Times'', October 12, 2012. Retrieved July 15, 2021.Raskin, Laura
"Sarah Oppenheimer,"
''Architectural Record'', August 2014, p 104. Retrieved August 4, 2021. The openings united, separated and altered the interconnected environments, offering shifting views and light conditions. Edged with bands of dark, matte aluminum cladding, they recalled the drawn lines and shapes of hard-edge geometric abstraction. ''The New York Timess

Roberta Smith Roberta Smith (born 1948) is co-chief art critic of ''The New York Times'' and a lecturer on contemporary art. She is the first woman to hold that position at the Times. Education and early life Born in 1948 in New York City and raised in Lawre ...

described ''D-33'' as "a new variation on the empty-gallery-as-art," which combined graphic punch and Caligari-esque

Expressionism Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...

to torque space "in ways both apparent and mysterious." ''W-120301'' (Baltimore Museum of Art, 2012) was Oppenheimer's first permanent work in a museum. It involved three precise, four-sided cutouts—in the ceiling of a second-floor gallery, in the wall of a third-floor gallery, and in the wall of an adjacent rotunda—that formed a Y-like shape opening into a volume embedded within the floors and walls.Ober, Cara
"Sarah Oppenheimer at the Baltimore Museum of Art,"
''Art Papers'', March/April 2013. Retrieved July 14, 2021. She arranged the aperture to create unexpected "shortcut" views of spaces located within a few feet of one another, but experientially remote. Oppenheimer extended her engagement with passageways and apertures to include movable and manually activated partitions utilizing the concept of the "switch"—devices or junctures that modulate or articulate movement and change, such as open/closed, reflection/transparency, continuity/separation. ''S-399390'' (Mudam, 2016) featured two inhabitable glass passageways that repeatedly changed position in the museum's Grand Hall according to an orchestrated scheme, modifying visitor movement, sightlines and perceptions of the space. During a two-year residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Oppenheimer developed a human-powered apparatus, the biased-axis rotational frame mounting system, for which she received a U.S. patent.''Artforum''
"Wexner Center Announces Artist Residency Awardees for 2015–16,"
July 8, 2015. Retrieved July 15, 2021.Oppenheimer, Sarah. Biased-Axis Rotational Frame Mounting System. U.S. Patent 10,139,046 B2, November 27, 2018. Retrieved July 22, 2021.Oppenheimer, Sarah. "Pivot and Slide," ''Movement Research Performance Journal'', #54: Spatial Practice, 2020, p. 74–5. It was used in three locations: ''S-281913'' ( Perez Art Museum Miami, 2016), ''S-337473'' (Wexner Center for the Arts, 2017), and ''S-334473'' (Mass MoCA, 2019).Mass MoCA
Sarah Oppenheimer, S-334473
Retrieved July 15, 2021.Heinrich, Will

''The New York Times'', September 12, 2019. Retrieved July 22, 2021. Each work featured two open glass volumes suspended in midair between thick steel tubes anchored to the floor and ceiling. Viewers set the volumes in slow rotating motion around a diagonal axis. The movement initiated a sequence of unexpected sightlines, thresholds, pathways and choreographies between artwork, viewer and built environment. Laurent Stalder wrote that Oppenheimer's later work "fundamentally challenges the conception of architecture as a solid and durable construction, proposing instead a conception of architecture as a controlled and controllable environment." ''N-01'' (Kunstmuseum Thun, 2020) featured a dynamic exhibition system of mechanically interconnected thresholds which when set in motion changed the position of one another.Yoon, Soyoung. "Buffer Zone," ''N-01'', Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2020. Describing ''N-01'', Soyoung Yoon wrote, "Each component of the work links to the other, communicates with each other, and the challenge is to see ourselves as also a component within this series of linkages—a complex, apparently-disjunctive series, which we learn to see as a whole."

Awards and collections

Oppenheimer has been awarded fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation (2007),

American Academy in Rome The American Academy in Rome is a research and arts institution located on the Gianicolo in Rome, Italy. The academy is a member of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers. History 19th century In 1893, a group of American architect ...

(2010–1), and

New York Foundation for the Arts The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) is an independent 501(c)(3) charity, funded through government, foundation, corporate, and individual support, established in 1971. It is part of a network of national not-for-profit arts organizations ...

(2016, 2010, 2006).New York Foundation for the Arts
"NYFA Announces Recipients and Finalists for 2016 Artists’ Fellowship Program,"
July 8, 2016. Retrieved July 14, 2021.New York Foundation for the Arts
"Names You Know,"
Alumni. Retrieved July 14, 2021. She has also received awards from Anonymous was a Woman (2013), the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2011), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (2009),The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation
Sarah Oppenheimer
Award Winners, 2009. Retrieved July 14, 2021. and

American Academy of Arts and Letters The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, Music of the United States, music, and Visual art of the United States, art. Its fixed number ...

(2007), among others.''Artforum''
"American Academy of Arts and Letters, Art Cologne Announce Awards,"
March 23, 2007. Retrieved July 22, 2021. Her work belongs to the public art collections of Mudam, Perez Art Museum Miami, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Mattress Factory, Baltimore Museum of Art,Baltimore Museum of Art
''P-010100'', Sarah Oppenheimer
Objects. Retrieved July 14, 2021. and Brown University.Brown University
Sarah Oppenheimer, ''P-131317'' (2011)
Public Art. Retrieved July 14, 2021.

External links

Artist's websiteSarah Oppenheimer interview with Alexander Galloway
in ''BOMB'', Fall 2016
Sarah Oppenheimer interview
Clocktower, June 2011

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Oppenheimer, Sarah 21st-century American artists American installation artists Artists from New York City Yale University alumni Brown University alumni Artists from Austin, Texas Living people 1972 births 21st-century American women sculptors 21st-century American sculptors