SARAH OLSON

Biography

Sarah Olson is a painter and performance artist whose recent work explores lost and layered histories. RISE ALL BOATS: A World Water Map, created with writer and James Baldwin scholar, Khadija Kamara interrogates the American migration story and premiered this fall on Governors Island(2019) with Works on Water and Underwater New York. LOST AT SEA, Olson's latest painting series about refugees crossing the Mediterranean was included in Vital Force: Water Essential this January(2020) at Front Room Gallery, NYC. Her painting series, EARTHTIME (2019), exhibited at Pratt Institute and NRG Energy in Princeton, NJ(a 100% sustainable energy company), views the earth through the last 500 million years and into the future. Olson’s multi-media show BURIED HISTORIES, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard (2018), created memorials with the public of almost forgotten soldiers at the Brooklyn Naval Cemetery. It also included painted maps of Wallabout Bay and it’s evolution into the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Her work has been exhibited at Marymount Manhattan College, Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum, DA Gallery, Gallery Satori, Dahesh Museum, Columbia University in NYC; and the Rivington Gallery and Museum of Design in London. She has created numerous installations and collaborative performances most notably at the Joyce SoHo, Summer Stage in Central Park, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and on residencies in remote locations in India, Scotland, England and El Salvador. Her work is in the collections of Bruce W. Ferguson, Eric Fischl and Eileen Guggenheim. She holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.