# Sarah Cain

Sarah Cain (born 1979), is an American contemporary artist.

## Life

Cain was born in 1979 in Albany, New York, and grew up in nearby Kinderhook. She moved to California in 1997 to study art at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she received her BFA in 2001. She went on to study at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving her MFA in studio art and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

## Work

Cain uses a variety of materials, including traditional canvas, stretcher bars, and paint, as well as less common artifacts, including musical notations, leaves and branches.
Quinn Latimer described Cain's work: "They court seemingly bad ideas—drawings sport feathers and doilies; installations feature eggs and hippy art teacher-like fabric swatches—and then transform them so deftly into serious painting that it can take a minute to understand what you’re looking at." In 2011, Cain collaborated with George Herms at the Orange County Museum of Art, where the curator Sarah Bancroft wrote for the accompanying catalog that the two artists share "an interest in language and a frustration over its limits in describing abstract work".
She has had solo exhibitions at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art, the Momentary, amongst others. And has been included in collective exhibitions at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Imperial Belvedere Palace Museum in Vienna, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Busan Biennale. In 2019, she completed her first major permanent public work at San Francisco International Airport: a 150-foot stained glass window with 270 colors, framed in soldered zinc, which was "painstakingly arranged so that no two adjoining fragments are the same shade."
In writing about Cain's work for the FLAG Art Foundation, curator Jamillah James wrote, "At their very core, Cain’s abstract paintings are radical and disorienting in the best possible way. Her attack and command of both physical and pictorial space is incisive yet wildly generous, leaving the viewer with no singular place to stand or look."
Poet Bernadette Mayer in her poem "Dear Sarah", described a painting by the artist as "it's like seeing a rainbow in the middle of the forest."

## Monographs

* Sarah Cain: Enter the Center, Delmonico/Tang, 2022.
* Sarah Cain: Music Book, X Artist's Books/Tang, 2021
* Sarah Cain: The Imaginary Architecture of Love, CAM Raleigh, 2016
* Sarah Cain, LAND, 2012

## Selected exhibitions

* Spotlight: Sarah Cain, The FLAG Art Foundation, 2024
* Sarah Cain: My Favorite Season is the Fall of the Patriarchy, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2021
* Sarah Cain: In Nature, The Momentary at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, curated by Lauren Haynes, 2021
* Sarah Cain: Opener 33 - Enter the Center, the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, 2021
* Sarah Cain: In Nature, The Momentary at the Crystal Bridges Art Museum, Bentonville, AR, 2021
* Sarah Cain: Now I'm Going to Tell You Everything, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, curated by Jamillah James, 2017
* Sarah Cain, Aspen Art Museum at the Elk Camp on Snowmass Mountain, CO, 2017
* Sarah Cain: The Imaginary Architecture of Love, Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, Raleigh, NC, 2015
* Sarah Cain: blue in your body, red when it hits the air, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 2015
* Painting in Place, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, Los Angeles, CA, 2013
* Gold, Curated by Thomas Zaunschirm, Imperial Belvedere Museum, Vienna, 2012
* SECA Art Award Exhibition, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, 2007
* Sarah Cain: I Believe We Are Believers, Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA, 2006
* Sarah Cain: A River of If's, Queens Nails Annex, San Francisco, CA, 2005

## Selected Press

* Jonathan Griffin, "With Big, Bold Art, Sarah Cain Redefines Seriousness in Painting" New York Times, Sept 30, 2021
* Dodie Kazanjian, "Sarah Cain is Ready to Take Up Space", Vogue, February 22, 2021
* Andrew Berardini, "She Comes in Colors: A Portrait of Sarah Cain", Momus, May 10, 2017
* Christopher Knight, "Review: ‘Painting in Place’ flings open conceptual abstraction doors" Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2013