Sarah Sense: Land, Line, Blood, Memory at Bruce Silverstein Gallery brings photography, basketry and archival research into close contact. On view from September 17 through November 7, 2026, the exhibition presents more than 20 new photo-weavings by the Chitimacha/Choctaw artist, whose work challenges the systems that have separated Indigenous people from ancestral land, cultural knowledge and historical record.
Sense builds each piece from contemporary landscape photographs, archival documents, historical images and maps, then interlaces them with bamboo and rice papers, cotton thread, ribbon and hand-prepared rivercane. The resulting works do not treat archives as neutral sources. Legal records and colonial maps, once used to name, divide and transfer land, become physical materials within a new visual structure. Lines that once imposed boundaries are interrupted, crossed and held in relation to the places they attempted to control.
The artist’s practice grows from family knowledge. Her grandmother’s basket collection first drew her to weaving, while summers spent in her grandfather’s Chitimacha community in Louisiana established a deeper connection to the tradition. Sense later developed her own approach to Chitimacha basketry with the tribe’s permission, combining inherited technique with the research she pursued in libraries and archives across the United States and Britain.
In this exhibition, land is not presented as scenery or property. Sense photographs places including Tahoe, Sequoia, Redwood and Yosemite National Parks as living sites shaped by Indigenous history and continued presence. Archival records of Chitimacha and Choctaw dispossession enter these landscapes, reconnecting bureaucratic language to the ground and communities from which it was severed. The work refuses the old fiction of an empty American wilderness waiting to be claimed.
A new Tree Weaving Quilt extends the project into family life. Made with the participation of Sense’s children, its ribbons and fabric wrap around tree-weaving works, turning care, protection and shared making into visible forms. Across Land, Line, Blood, Memory, weaving becomes a method of repair: an act that joins fragmented documents, material histories and living relationships without pretending that the fractures never occurred.
