Sarah Sense Chitimacha, Choctaw, American, b. 1980

Choctaw and Chitimacha artist Sarah Sense (b. 1980) pushes the boundaries of the photographic medium through her photo-weavings that combine photography, archival ephemera, and traditional basket-weaving techniques. Physically interlacing photographic images, she does not obscure the role of photography, but emphasizes its ability to carry narratives, crafting structural pieces that embody in their composition the inter-complexity and transitory nature of memory, land, colonialism, indigenous culture, and environmental change. 

Born and raised in Sacramento, California, Sense gained a love of baskets and an interest in basket weaving from her grandmother. With the blessing of the Chairman of the Chitimacha Tribe, she began practicing her variation of the traditional method during graduate school at Parsons the New School for Design in New York. Sense graduated with her MFA in Fine Art from Parsons in 2005 after receiving a BFA in Studio Art from California State University, Chico in 2003. While working as Director and Curator of the American Indian Community House in New York in 2007, Sense catalogued the House’s thirty-year history, inspiring her international search for Indigenous art. Her research has taken her across the Americas, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and Europe. 

Sense’s work explores cultural continuity in the midst of colonial systems, addressing displacement and erasure as well as honoring generational connection and traditional practices. Taking photographic prints — archival, personally shot, or a digital manipulation of both — Sense cuts them into strips, creating literal and symbolic space for broader interpretations of American and international histories. In her 2018 series Cowgirls and Indian Princesses, antique Hollywood posters, Wild West imagery, family photographs, and her Choctaw grandmother’s memoirs are woven atop one another, raising questions about the narrative and media portrayal of the Great American West. In the 2026 Land, Lines, Blood, Memoryseries, Sense weaves images she took of U.S. National Parks landscapes and related documents, adding in traditionally sourced, organic materials to create dynamic compositions, wherein movement of the Choctaw and Chitimacha basket patterns complement the flowing energy of towering trees.  

Sense’s large-scale woven works have been commissioned by institutions including Florida State University, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and her work is held in public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Art, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, the Portland Museum of Art in Oregon, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.