STATEMENT
Sara Garden Armstrong is a visual artist whose decades-long practice embraces a wide range of scales and techniques, from large site-specific sculpture to hand-held artist’s books, all of which examine organic processes of transformation. Chance and change drive her creative exploration of the possibilities of materials. Her work investigates the interactions between various physiological phenomena and the human body using movement, repetition, transparency, layering and mapping, and, at times, sound and light.
BIOGRAPHY
Armstrong has exhibited nationally and internationally since the 1970s. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Alabama. After living in New York City for 36 years, she returned to Birmingham, where she currently lives and works.
She has had solo exhibitions at John Gibson Gallery, Dieu Donné, Souyin Yi Gallery, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City, as well as the Birmingham Museum of Art, Space One Eleven, and the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions—A.I.R. Gallery and Sculpture Center, New York City; U.S. Embassy, Czech Republic, Prague; Stiftung für Konkrete Kunst, Reutlingen, Germany; Bellevue Arts Museum, Washington; and the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach. Armstrong was a 2015/16 recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation CALL (Creating a Living Legacy) grant through Space One Eleven.
Her artist’s books and artworks are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Time, Inc., New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Bibliothèque Nationale and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL; and many others. Her atrium sculptures are included in collections at the Civitan International Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the United Therapeutic Corporation, Silver Spring, MD. A lavishly illustrated monograph—SARA GARDEN ARMSTRONG: Threads and Layers—was published in 2020 and accompanies a traveling exhibition by the same name.