Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Sarah Crowner draws with scissors and paints with a sewing machine. This Brooklyn-based artist, born in Philadelphia, couldn’t care less about your elitist categories and your well-established boundaries between painting and sculpture, between craft and fine arts. For more than fifteen years, she has cut, assembled, and sewn painted canvases to create works that question our physical relationship to art and force us to rethink what a painting can be.
Crowner belongs to that generation of artists who refuse the intimidating legacy of triumphant modernism in order to reinvent it piece by piece. Her sewn canvases immediately evoke the geometric abstraction of the 1950s-1960s, that period when Ellsworth Kelly or Kenneth Noland explored the sharp contours characteristic of the “hard-edge” movement and color fields. But whereas these masters sought industrial perfection and the erasure of the hand, Crowner claims visible stitching, artisanal imperfection, the trace of the gesture. Each painted piece of fabric retains its own identity within the whole, creating compositions where unity arises from the assumed diversity of the parts.
This approach finds its roots in a deep understanding of modernist architecture and its utopias. The artist does not just hang her works on walls: she creates platforms of glazed terracotta tiles that rise fifteen centimeters above the floor, literally inviting us to enter the space of art. These installations recall the totalizing ambitions of the Bauhaus, where Walter Gropius dreamed of a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art that would unite architecture, painting, sculpture, and craft in an immersive experience.
Modernist architecture, with its faith in constructive rationality and its desire to transform society through the built environment, permeates Crowner’s entire approach. Like the architects of the 1920s who displayed the structure of their buildings rather than hiding it, the artist shows the seams of her paintings, revealing the construction process. The tiles of her platforms, handmade in the Ceramics Suro workshop in Guadalajara, bear the marks of their shaping and firing, rejecting industrial anonymity. This tension between modernist project and traditional know-how runs throughout her work.
Her installations evoke the utopian spaces imagined by architects of the modern movement, those places where art and daily life were meant to merge. When Crowner transforms the gallery into a theatrical stage with her raised platforms, she reactivates this architectural ambition while subverting it. Her work for the American Ballet Theatre, notably the sets and costumes for “Garden Blue” choreographed by Jessica Lang in 2018, extends this reflection on space as a framework for aesthetic experience [1].
Architecture is not just a conceptual reference for Crowner: it becomes raw material. Her large panoramic canvases over six meters long, such as “Night Painting with Verticals” from 2020, directly engage with the architectural space of the galleries. The human scale of these works, their ability to envelop the viewer’s gaze, their relationship to the floor and ceiling, all contribute to making each exhibition a total environment where painting and architecture respond to each other.
This architectural approach to painting finds a strong echo in theatrical art, Crowner’s second preferred area of investigation. Theater, an art of space and time, an art of bodies’ presence in a given place, offers the artist a laboratory to explore the performative dimensions of her works. Since her first platforms in 2011, Crowner conceives her installations as potential stages, spaces activated by the spectator-actor.
This theatrical dimension is not anecdotal: it deeply structures her conception of art. When Crowner speaks of her paintings as “backdrops” and her platforms as “stages,” she reveals a thought that refuses passive contemplation. Her works do not simply ask to be looked at: they demand to be inhabited, traversed, physically experienced. The viewer becomes a performer despite herself, aware of her body in space, her movements, her presence.
This approach echoes the most avant-garde theatrical research of the 20th century, from Gordon Craig to Robert Wilson, who explored the relationships between stage space and perception. Like these creators, Crowner understands that art can be a device for sensory awakening, a means to reveal our embodied relationship to the world. Her collaborations with choreographers, musicians, and dancers extend this fundamental intuition: art fully exists only in the encounter between the work and the body that experiences it.
Theater also offers Crowner an alternative temporal model to that of traditional museum contemplation. A theatrical performance imposes its duration, its rhythm, its dramatic progression. Similarly, the artist’s installations create pathways, sequences of approach and discovery that temporalize the aesthetic experience. One does not simply look at a work by Crowner: one visits it, explores it, stays within it.
This temporal dimension finds its most literal expression in the performances that the artist sometimes organizes within her installations. These events, such as “Post Tree” realized in collaboration with James Hoff and Carolyn Schoerner in 2016, reveal the latent dramatic potential of her spaces. Dance activates the geometric shapes of the paintings, music vibrates the colored surfaces, transforming the installation into a score for bodies and gazes.
But perhaps it is in her understanding of everyday theatricality that Crowner shows the most subtlety. Her platforms transform the simple act of walking into a conscious act, a meaningful gesture. Stepping onto these fifteen-centimeter-high stages is to accept being seen, to become an actor in one’s own visit. This minimal theatricalization of the everyday reveals the ordinarily invisible performative dimensions of our relationship to art.
Crowner’s art is born from this dual architectural and theatrical lineage. Her works create specific space-times where aesthetic experience regains its physical, social, collective dimension. In an era dominated by the virtualization of human relations and the atomization of experiences, this work proposes a discreet but tenacious resistance. It reminds us that art can still be a place of meeting, a space of shared presence.
The technique of sewing, central to Crowner’s practice, embodies this philosophy of connection and assembly. Each sewn canvas is a manifesto for art as collective construction, as an addition of singularities. Contrary to the romantic myth of the solitary artist, Crowner claims an art made of collaborations: with her assistants who help her sew, with the Mexican artisans who make her tiles, with the architects who design the exhibition spaces, with the performers who activate her installations.
This aesthetics of cooperation finds its most accomplished expression in the recent large panoramic canvases. Landscape-works on an architectural scale, they cannot be grasped at a single glance and require a journey, a movement of the viewer who becomes himself a part of the work. As in the best artistic collaborations, each element maintains its autonomy while contributing to a whole that transcends them.
The historical references that Crowner invokes, from Ellsworth Kelly to Lygia Clark and the Russian constructivists, reflect a demanding artistic culture employed in the service of a contemporary vision. The artist does not copy these masters: she quotes them, distorts them, updates them. Her version of Lygia Clark’s “Superficie Modulada,” created in 2009, inaugurates her sewn painting technique while paying tribute to this pioneer of Brazilian participatory art.
This citation approach reveals a conception of art history as a reservoir of forms to reactivate rather than a frozen heritage to worship. Crowner practices a creative recycling of the 20th-century avant-gardes, passing them through the filter of her contemporary sensibility and current concerns. She shows that the modernist legacy can still nourish living artistic research, provided it is rethought and reinvented.
Sarah Crowner’s work ultimately teaches us that contemporary art can regain its transformative ambitions without renouncing its critical complexity. By reconciling abstraction and craftsmanship, elitism and accessibility, contemplation and participation, she traces an original path in the current artistic landscape. Her sewn paintings and tile installations offer an aesthetic experience that is both sophisticated and immediately accessible, scholarly and popular.
In an art world often closed in on its own codes, Crowner reminds us that art can still be a shared language, a meeting space between different sensibilities. Her works create situations where the aesthetic experience becomes collective, physical, and joyful again. They invite us to inhabit art rather than just contemplate it, to experience it rather than just decode it.
This fundamental generosity, this faith in the powers of art as a transformative experience, makes Sarah Crowner a unique and necessary voice in the contemporary art landscape. Her work reminds us that art, far from being a luxury reserved for the initiated, can become what it should never have ceased to be: a means to broaden our perception of the world and enrich our common experience of existence.
- Jessica Lang, “Garden Blue,” American Ballet Theatre, Lincoln Center, October 2018, costumes and sets by Sarah Crowner.
