SITE Santa Fe (1997

Sarah at 50

LOUIS GRACHOS I discovered Sarah’s work at International with Monument, that great East Village gallery that had all these incredible people. I was captivated by her work and started to follow it. When I became director of exhibitions at the Queens Museum, I wanted her to do one of my project spaces. I was a very young curator in a venue that wasn’t the MoMA or the Whitney so it took a lot of courage to call her. Sarah was intimidating in the sense that so many artists of that generation were so intellectually rigorous and so prepared. She expected people to pay attention to her ideas and make the effort to understand her work. She was a really toughminded artist.

I called and said, “I’d like to talk about a potential project.” I felt she needed more exposure in the museum culture. I asked her about the possibility of doing a midcareer survey. That was probably 1990, 1991, something like that. Finally, after four years, it got to the stage where we said, “Okay, let’s see if we can get this to happen.” By that time, I was at SITE Santa Fe, and I found a great partner to work on the project, Susan Sterling. The way Sarah worked became pivotal to how this show evolved, specifically the strong and determined linking of the different series as she progressed. It was important that the exhibition not just be, “Let’s select a few things from different eras and put together a show.” We wanted the show to evolve physically. The format revealed the complexities, the evolution of her work, the progression and relationship between her ideas. After we finished, she came into my office and said, “I’m really happy. The show really works beautifully.” It was a wonderful moment, the kind of thing you hope you achieve when you’re working with an artist.

SARAH That show went from Santa Fe to San Diego,12 and then to Washington, where Susan hosted it at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And because Washington was near New York, all my friends from New York—Cindy and Laurie and Lisa Phillips and Kate Linker and many of the women who were writers or curators or artists, friends, my family—all came to the opening in Washington. My mother, who lived in Maine and was getting to be an older lady, and my two young children, came to Washington together, and I had a chance to show them what I do. Then it went to the Rose near Boston at Brandeis. And my father and mother and uncles and everybody came to see it at the Rose. That was a lovely experience for me.

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SITE Santa Fe. Curated by Louis Grachos and Susan Fisher Sterling; November 1, 1997–January 25, 1998.

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