Bruce Silverstein Gallery announces 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 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.
At a moment when the nation is reconsidering whose histories are preserved within its founding narratives, Sense’s photo-weavings insist upon a deeper history as one rooted in Indigenous relationships to land that long predate the Republic and endure despite centuries of dispossession, broken treaties, and erasure. Interlacing maps, government records, historical images, family archives, contemporary landscapes, and rivercane through Chitimacha and Choctaw basketry patterns, she transforms instruments once used to define ownership and authority into living structures of memory, continuity, and resistance. Her work offers the kind of Indigenous perspective increasingly recognized as essential to an honest commemoration of America at 250.
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.”
