Sarah Sense: Land, Line, Blood, Memory: Sarah Sense in Conversation with Elizabeth Cronin

Please join us for a conversation between artist Sarah Sense and Elizabeth Cronin, Curator of Photography at The New York Public Library.

Sarah Sense (b. 1980, Sacramento, California) is a Choctaw and Chitimacha artist known for her photo-weavings combining contemporary landscape photographs, historical imagery, maps, government records, family archives, and hand-prepared rivercane. Drawing upon traditional basketry patterns, her work examines Indigenous relationships to ancestral land and the systems of representation, ownership, and erasure that have attempted to sever those connections. Her work is held in public and private collections internationally, including the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares in Mexico City, the Chitimacha Tribal Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The conversation will explore Sense’s distinctive weaving practice, her engagement with photography and archival materials, and the ways memory, history, and cultural continuity are carried through material and form.

Elizabeth Cronin is the Robert B. Menschel Curator of Photography at The New York Public Library. She has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Viewpoints: Latin America in Photographs, Anna Atkins Refracted, and Public Eye: 175 Years of Sharing Photography. In 2024, she curated the expansive exhibition The Awe of the Arctic: A Visual History and edited its accompanying catalogue. Cronin has also written extensively on Heimat photography in Austria, publishing a book on the subject in 2015. She holds an MA in German Studies from the Technical University of Dresden and a PhD in Art History from the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Land, Line, Blood, Memory is on view at Bruce Silverstein Gallery from September 17 through November 21, 2026.