Sara VanDerBeek (born 1976), is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. She is known for photographing sculptures and three-dimensional still-life assemblages of her own making, some of which she destroys after the photos have been taken, as well as for exploring the depiction of women in art history particularly classical or ancient sculpture.

Early life and education

VanDerBeek grew up in Baltimore and studied visual arts at

Baltimore School for the Arts The Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA) is a public performing arts high school located in Mount Vernon, Baltimore, Maryland, United States and is part of the Baltimore City Public Schools system. Established in 1979, The Baltimore School for the ...

during her high school years. Her father, Stan VanDerBeek, was an experimental filmmaker. She moved to New York in 1994 to attend her father's alma mater,

Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...

. After graduating, she worked in commercial photography in London for three years. She returned to New York in 2001 and in 2003 she opened Guild & Greyshkul, an art gallery, in Soho with her brother, Johannes VanDerBeek, a sculptor, and artist Anya Kielar, another Cooper graduate. The gallery closed in 2009.

Work

VanDerBeek is considered one of several contemporary photographers — among them Michele Abeles,

Liz Deschenes Liz Deschenes (born 1966) is an American contemporary artist and educator. Her work is situated between sculpture and image and engages with post-conceptual photography and Minimalism. Her work examines the fluidity of the medium of photography a ...

and

Eileen Quinlan Eileen Quinlan (born 1972 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a self-described still-life photographer who shoots with medium format and large format cameras. An art critic for '' Art in America'' likened her style to that of Moholy-Nagy and James Wel ...

— who are extending the innovations of the earlier

Pictures Generation ''The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984'' was an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York City that ran from April 29 – August 2, 2009. The exhibition took its name from ''Pictures'', a 1977 group show organized by art h ...

into new territory. Her work focuses on photographs of assemblages that she creates in her studio. Her work was included in "New Photography 2009" at the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

in New York City. Curator

Eva Respini Eva Respini (born 1976) is a curator of contemporary art who served as chief curator (2015–2023) and deputy director for curatorial affairs (2022–2023) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. She is also a lecturer at Harvard University ...

, who put together the MoMA show, described VanDerBeek's art as having a hybrid nature: "Although Sara is a photographer, I like to think of her practice as multidisciplinary...

he is He or HE may refer to: Language * He (pronoun), an English pronoun * He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ * He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets * He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' ...

very interested in the space of sculpture, the space of theater." Her first solo museum show, "To Think of Time" at the Whitney in 2010, contained photographs of still lifes with objects including funerary masks and architectural details. VanDerBeek also uses imagery of classical figures in her work. She told Aperture's Brian Sholis in 2013, "I have always been interested in how photography affects the reading of scale, time, and place. It can be disorienting or confusing to encounter a photograph of something, but it can also usefully enlighten some little-perceived aspect of real-life experience." Since 2010, VanDerBeek's work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and internationally.

Collections

VanDerBeek's work is in the permanent collections: *

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously exp ...

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's o ...

Brooklyn Museum The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 1.5 million objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Crown H ...

Cornell Fine Arts Museum The Rollins Museum of Art is located on the Winter Park campus of Rollins College and is the only teaching museum in the greater Orlando area. The museum houses more than 5,000 objects ranging from antiquity through contemporary eras, including ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:VanDerBeek, Sara 1976 births Living people American women artists Cooper Union alumni Artists from Baltimore American women photographers Photographers from New York City