Sarah Sense Chitimacha, Choctaw, American, b. 1980

Sarah Sense (b. 1980) lives and works in California. Sense has traveled extensively through the Americas, Europe, United Kingdom and Southeast Asia. Her landscape photography is an essential part of her travel and visual art practice. Sense’s weaving practice began in New York while a master’s student at Parson New School for Design (2003-2005). While director and curator of the American Indian Community House Gallery, New York, Sense catalogued the gallery’s thirty-year history, inspiring her search for Indigenous art internationally. Her world travels were charged with archive research, photo-weaving project that expanded to community programming, international Indigenous artist interviews and a book Weaving the Americas.

Artist Statement

Living and traveling through Europe, the United Kingdom, Southeast Asia and the Americas, has privileged me the opportunity of learning about contemporary Indigenous life and settler-colonial histories. With my landscape photography and familial weaving traditions, I re-envision basket patterning from my Chitimacha and Choctaw heritage by weaving photographs of maps, manuscripts and landscapes to tell stories of colonialism, resistance, and resilience. The act of cutting and weaving together old maps and new landscapes with traditional patterns re-indigenizes the landscapes while decolonizing maps.