Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze (; born 1969) is an American artist and professor of visual arts at Columbia University. She has exhibited internationally and her works are in the collections of several major museums. Sze's work explores the role of technology and information in contemporary life utilizing everyday materials. Drawing from Modernist traditions, Sze's work often represents objects caught in suspension.

Early life and education
Sze was born in Boston in 1969. Her father, Chia-Ming Sze, was an architect who moved to the United States from Shanghai at age four and her mother, Judy Mossman, was an Anglo-Scottish-Irish schoolteacher. Sze reports that as a child she would draw constantly. She attended Milton Academy as a day student and graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Architecture and Painting from Yale University in 1991.

Career 

Sze's work has been featured in The Whitney Biennial (2000), the Carnegie International (1999) and several international biennials, including Berlin (1998), Guangzhou (2015), Liverpool (2008), Lyon (2009), São Paulo (2002), and Venice (1999, 2013, and 2015). 

Sze has created public artworks for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Walker Art Center, and the High Line in New York.

Sze is a 2003 MacArthur Fellow and was granted a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award in 1999.

Work 
In 2013, Sze represented the United States at the Venice Biennale with an exhibition called Triple Point. 

On January 1, 2017, a permanent installation commissioned by MTA Arts & Design of drawings by Sze on ceramic tiles opened in the 96th Street subway station on the new Second Avenue Subway line in New York City. 

In 2020, Sze unveiled Shorter than the Day, a permanent installation, in LaGuardia Airport 

In 2021, Sze unveiled her most recent permanent installation, Fallen Sky, at Storm King Art Center, Cornwall, New York. 

For her 2023 exhibition called Timelapse at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Sze created a series of site-specific installations through the Frank Lloyd Wright building.

In 2023, Sze transformed a large Victorian waiting room at Peckham Rye Station in London into an immersive installation called The Waiting Room. 

In 2023, Sze was featured in Art21's New York Closeup Series.

Personal life 
Sze has one brother, the venture capitalist David Sze. Sze lives in New York City with her husband Siddhartha Mukherjee and their two daughters. Sze’s great-grandfather, Alfred Sao-ke Sze, was the first Chinese student to go to Cornell University. He was China’s minister to Britain and later ambassador to the United States. Her grandfather is Szeming Sze who was the initiator of World Health Organization.

Process 
Sze draws from Modernist traditions of the found object, to build large scale installations. She uses everyday items like string, Q-tips, photographs, and wire to create complex constellations whose forms change with the viewer's interaction. The effect of this is to "challenge the very material of sculpture, the very constitution of sculpture, as a solid form that has to do with finite geometric constitutions, shapes, and content." 

When selecting materials, Sze focuses on the exploration of value acquisition–what value the object holds and how it is acquired. In an interview with curator Okwui Enwezor, Sze explained that during her conceptualization process, she will "choreograph the experience to create an ebb and flow of information [...] thinking about how people approach, slow down, stop, perceive [her art]."

Exhibitions

Sze has staged a large number of solo exhibitions and shows across the United States and internationally. Her notable solo exhibitions include White Room (1997), White Columns, New York; Sarah Sze (1999), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Sarah Sze: The Triple Point of Water (2003-2004), originating at the Whitney Museum, New York; Triple Point (2013), American pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale; and Sarah Sze: Timelapse (2023), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Sze has also participated in a wide array of group exhibitions, including the Berlin Biennale (1998); 48th and 56th Venice Biennale (1999, 2015); Whitney Biennial (2000); and Liverpool Biennial (2008).

Notable works in public collections

Seamless (1999), Tate, London
Many a Slip (1999), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Strange Attractor (2000), Whitney Museum, New York
Things Fall Apart (2001), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Untitled (Table Top) (2001), Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Grow or Die (2002), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
The Letting Go (2002), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Everything in its right place (2002-2003), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
The Art of Losing (2004), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan
Blue Poles (2004), List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Second Means of Egress (Orange) (2004), Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York
Sexton (from Triple Point of Water) (2004-2005), Detroit Institute of Arts
Proportioned to the Groove (2005), Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
360 (Portable Planetarium) (2010), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Triple Point (Pendulum) (2013), Museum of Modern Art, New York
Mirror with Landscape Leaning (Fragment Series) (2015), Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut
Plywood Sunset Leaning (Fragment Series) (2015), Cleveland Museum of Art
Split Stone (Northwest) (2019), Western Gallery, Western Washington University, Bellingham

Awards and grants

 
 2022 - Asia Arts Game Change Award
 2020 - Inductee, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
 2018 – The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York
 2013 – US Representative for the Venice Biennale

References

Further reading

External links
 
 Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
 Victoria Miro Gallery
 Venice Biennale U.S Pavilion Exhibition
 Carnegie Museum of Art site on Sze
 Sarah Sze: Infinite Line site, Asia Society
 Interview for The New Yorker with Andrea Scott, 2012

1969 births
Living people
American people of Chinese descent
Artists from Boston
Columbia University faculty
Columbia University people
MacArthur Fellows
Milton Academy alumni
School of Visual Arts alumni
Yale University alumni
20th-century American women artists
Sculptors from Massachusetts
American women academics
21st-century American women
Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
American women sculptors