Biography

Biography

Born Boston, 1969 Lives and Works in New York

1997 School of Visual Arts, MFA, New York 1991 Yale University, BA, New Haven, CT

Sarah Sze grew up in Boston, the daughter of a Chinese-American architect father and an American born schoolteacher mother. She attended Yale University and double majored in architecture and painting. She took up sculpture during her last year at Yale, and her teacher, Ron Jonas, turned his students toward conceptualism which held great appeal for Sze.

Sze's first sculpture was made on the University center green during the Gulf War. During the night she and some friends assembled 15,000 tiny American flags laid out in a grid.

Following her undergraduate studies, Sze spent a year in Japan working at a TV station and studying ikebana, Japanese flower arranging. The following four years were spent in Boston where she worked in a public-school art-education program and painted on weekends. She then moved to New York and entered the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts.

In 1997 Sze entered a group show organized by the artist Laurie Simmons for the Casey Kaplan Gallery. Her sculpture consisted of tiny soap sculptures of Cracker Jax prizes on Ritz cracker pedestals with lots of colorfully wrapped candies.

In 1999 the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris offered Sze the opportunity to fill two glass-enclosed galleries which could be viewed from several angles at once. The resulting work, "Everything that Rises must Converge" was a sculpture of household objects and building materials which rose up and flowed throughout the space.

Since then Sarah Sze has exhibited at the Whitney Biennial; Boesky; Bard College; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy.

Source: "ARTnews", Summer 2003 "," registrar@AskART.com."