Sarah Sense: Land, Line, Blood, Memory

Bruce Silverstein Gallery is pleased to announce Land, Line, Blood, Memory, the gallery’s third solo exhibition of work by Chitimacha/Choctaw artist Sarah Sense (b. 1980), who for more than two decades, has been a defining voice in contemporary photography. Comprising of more than twenty new photo-weavings made from the artist’s contemporary landscape photographs, archival documents, historical images, maps, printed bamboo and rice papers, cotton thread, ribbon, and hand-prepared rivercane, the exhibition considers the relationship between Indigenous people and ancestral land and the systems of representation, ownership, and erasure that have attempted to sever that connection.

Sense’s practice is grounded equally in inherited knowledge and original research. Her grandmother, Chile Blanche Stouff, kept a collection of family baskets that gave Sense her first love of the form, while summers in her grandfather’s Chitimacha community in Louisiana rooted her in the culture that made them. With the blessing of the Chairman of the Chitimacha Tribe, Sense began developing her variation of traditional basketry methods while earning her MFA at Parsons the New School for Design. A curator, writer, and researcher as well as an artist, she held a British Library Eccles Centre Fellowship from 2019 to 2022 and is the author of Weaving the Americas. The maps, records, and images in her work are primary sources she located through this research, transforming them into dynamic and beautiful works of art.

Her latest series, Land, Line, Blood, Memory, provides a framework for the intertwined histories embedded throughout the work.  In Sense’s Artist Statement she writes, “Land, Line, Blood, Memory is about connecting to ancestry through basket weaving and generational healing. Woven photographs intertwine images of land that hold memory, baskets that hold, ancestry, historical photography that tell stories, and maps that draw lines.” (For the full Statement, click here.)

Land is understood not as property but as a living source of knowledge, relationship, and cultural continuity. Working with renowned weaver John Paul Darden, Sense participated in the ancestral process of harvesting, dyeing, peeling, and splitting rivercane, incorporating this material into the work as both a physical connection to the land and an acknowledgment of the generations of Indigenous weavers who have sustained this knowledge. Line examines the borders, names and legal records imposed through colonial mapping, exposing how systems of stewardship were transformed into systems of ownership disrupting Indigenous relationships to place. Blood draws on archival land records documenting the transfer and dispossession of Chitimacha and Choctaw ancestral homelands in what is now Southeast United States, weaving these bureaucratic documents into images of the natural world to reconnect them with the living landscapes and histories they sought to erase. Memory considers the gaps and omissions of the historical record through archival photographs, historical landscape imagery, and Sense's own stunning photographs of Tahoe, Sequoia, Redwood, and Yosemite National Parks. She challenges the enduring myths of the American landscape as empty, untouched, and available for possession by restoring the presence of the Indigenous communities whose histories remain inseparable from these places.

The exhibition introduces Sense’s first Tree Weaving Quilt, a new medium within her practice and one of the project’s most intimate works. Sense incorporates her themes by including her children in the process of creation, further connecting the next generation to ancestral land and culture. Simultaneously working outdoors and indoors, her work expands beyond libraries and archives. Sense writes: “With ribbon and fabric, sewing and weaving patterns, we worked together to create something that would hold a tree, and a blanket that would wrap around us. The comfort and adornment of the tree weaving and quilt was shared as a family as an act of love and safety.” In the gallery, the large and colorful quilt stretches its ribboned arms around Tree Weaving works as a visual embodiment of her family’s very personal work.

Through Land, Line, Blood, Memory, Sense transforms weaving into an act of reclamation, binding together histories that colonial systems have fragmented and obscured. The resulting compositions are at once deeply personal and broadly political, asserting Indigenous presence not as a remnant of the past, but as a living and evolving force. Land, Line, Blood, Memory asks us to reconsider how history is constructed, who has the authority to tell it, and what becomes possible when memory is carried forward. Through her work, the gallery is transformed into a space where personal memory, ancestral continuity, environmental responsibility, and historical accountability remain active in the present.

Sarah Sense was born and raised in Sacramento, California. She received her BFA in Studio Art from California State University, Chico, in 2003 and her MFA in Fine Art from Parsons the New School for Design in 2005. While serving as Director and Curator of the American Indian Community House in New York, Sense catalogued the organization’s thirty-year history, initiating an international investigation of Indigenous art that has taken her across the Americas, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and Europe. Her large-scale woven works have been commissioned by institutions including Florida State University, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Her work is held in numerous public collections, including the National Gallery of Art, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, the Montclair Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Rijksmuseum.