Sara VanDerBeek was born in Baltimore in 1976 and lives and works in New York. Recent exhibitions include VanDerBeek + VanDerBeek at the Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center, Asheville, North Carolina (with Stan VanDerBeek) and Women & Museums at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (both 2019). Sara VanDerBeek has had additional exhibitions at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; and Whitney Museum, New York. VanDerBeek’s work was included in the inaugural New Visions Triennial for Photography and New Media at the Henie Onstad Art Center, Høvikodden, Norway (2020). She has also participated in group exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Kunsthalle Berlin; Morgan Library and Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Selected links to press and publications
“Sara VanDerBeek’s photographic and sculptural arrangements emulate a poet’s economic use of structure, phrasing and rhythm to suspend images and multiple processes within a rigorously shaped framework. This first book-length study presents close readings of VanDerBeek’s (*1976 in Baltimore) experimentation with photographic capture, printing, cast-concrete forms, and built environments that draw on diverse material cultures.
Ultimately, the book richly distills the chance, process, physicality, reflection and recollection of her site visits to Detroit, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Rome, Paris, Naples, Rotterdam and New York between 2006 and 2016.
Contributions by international scholars and curators offer an oblique angle not only into Sara VanDerBeek’s vital practice, but also the ways VanDerBeek is shaping current debates on the relationship between image and object within contemporary art”
VanDerBeek+VanDerBeek, Black Mountain College Books
“Catalogue for the exhibition VanDerBeek + VanDerBeek, held September 20, 2019 – January 4, 2020 at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center.
VanDerBeek + VanDerBeek presents artwork by Sara VanDerBeek (b. 1976, Baltimore, MD) alongside work by her father, Stan VanDerBeek (b. 1927, New York, NY – d. 1984, Baltimore, MD), a Black Mountain College alum.
Featuring essays from Gloria Sutton, Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur and Hyemin Kim. Edited by Sara VanDerBeek and Chelsea Spengemann with a foreword by Jeff Arnal.”
Art in America, 2019 – “Sara VanDerBeek’s exhibition “Women & Museums,” on view at Metro Pictures, New York, through October 5, consists of six large photographic prints. All vertically oriented and cast in the pinks and blues of sunset, the images depict objects representing women and made by women….”
Photograph, 2019 – “…More recently Sara VanDerBeek has turned her eye to museological objects, particularly ones related to women – Greek and Roman statuary, vessels, and textiles that she mines from museum archives. This exploration, fostered by a 2012 residency at Fondazione Memmo in Rome…”
Aperture, 2016 – Respini, Eva. “On Defiance: Experimentation as Resistance”, including the work of amongst others. Sara VanDerBeek, Sarah Charlesworth, Anna Atkins, Bernmice Abbot, Barbara Kasten, Miranda Lichtenstein and Liz Deschenes.
Artpress, 2015 – “I am less interested in defining a stance on abstraction than in considering how an image can reach a balance of the actual and the imagined.” (Sara VanDerBeek).
Artforum, 2014 – “…Not unlike the ancients who used ritual artifacts to help map the inconstant moon, Sara VanDerBeek employs photography as a contemporary means to track the passage of time through the interaction of objects and light”.
Flash Art, 2012 – A conversation between Sarah Charlesworth (1947 – 2013) and Sara VanDerBeek.
The New York Times, 2010 “…While their discoveries were “like sifting through history,” the process of clearing them out was “like a physical manifestation of change,” Sara VanDerBeek said. “I hope my work is as much about the positive and inspirational aspects of change as it is about loss or melancholy.”
Museums and Public Collections
Baltimore Museum of Art
Brooklyn Museum, New York
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Cincinnati Art Museum
Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida Dallas Museum of Art
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
NSU Art Museum Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York
The Brooklyn Museum, New York
The Francis Young Tang Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, New York The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC
The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
UBS Art Collection, Zurich
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota