Sarah Sense
(Sacramento, California, 1980 - )
Sarah Sense creates complex imagery by weaving digital photographs into traditional Chitimacha basket designs that reference her own cultural heritage as an American with Native Choctaw and Chitimacha ancestry.[1] During her childhood, the artist’s Choctaw grandmother Laverne Blanche Jones’s extensive basket collection, which included Chitimacha and Choctaw baskets as well as a sizable international collection gathered from travels around the world, made Sense immediately aware of weaving as a craft tradition. As a teenager, her knowledge deepened further when she served as a researcher for the Chitimacha cultural department in Louisiana, recovering tribal patterns unknown by the current generation of weavers. Eventually, as she pursued graduate education in fine art, Sense combined her interests and began practicing photo-weaving with traditional basket techniques in 2004. She only did so after receiving permission from the chairman of the Chitimacha Nation. “It was the most sacred thing for me at that moment,” Sense later recalled, “The most important thing for me was that I was incredibly respectful of other basket weavers. I felt very moved to do this, and I wanted to do it in a careful and considerate way.” [2]
Sense has completed a BFA from California State University Chico (2003) and an MFA from Parsons the New School for Design in New York (2005). She was the curator and director of the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York from 2005–2007, and during that time she catalogued the gallery’s thirty-year history. Her early photo-weavings began with the Chitimacha landscape of Louisiana and, with a critical eye, blended it with Hollywood interpretations of Native North America. Sense moved to South America in 2010 for research, and her work changed to include travels journals, landscape photography, and family archives to serve the purpose of revealing Indigenous histories through storytelling. Most notably, her investigation of Native art from twelve countries in the Western Hemisphere led to the book and exhibition Weaving the Americas in Valdivia and Santiago, Chile in 2011. Sense also traveled to Southeast Asia and the Caribbean for another exhibition titled Weaving Water, which debuted in Bristol, England in 2013. While living in Ireland she collaborated with her grandmother for Grandmother’s Stories (which opened at AHHA in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2015) and a series of works about family lines and motherhood for Remember (at the World Cultures Museum in Frankfurt, Germany in 2016). Sense currently conducts research as a British Library Eccles Centre Fellow, an ongoing position that has resulted in the installation of a sculpture at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth, England. Her most recent commissions for Florida State University (2021) and the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth (2022) are wall-sized weavings of maps and documents from the British Library archive. Drawing from similar archival sources, her most recent map and landscape weavings focus on colonial impacts on climate, with the purpose of conceptually reinstating Indigeneity and decolonizing colonial maps through traditional weaving practice.[3]
[1] Rainmaker Gallery, “Sarah Sense,” https://www.rainmakerart.co.uk/sarah-sense/.
[2] Theresa Barbaro, “Sarah Sense: Weaving Place and Memory,” American Indian Magazine, vol. 15 no. 1 (Spring 2014), https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/sarah-sense-weaving-place-and-memory.
[3] Sarah Sense, “Biography,” https://sarahsense.com/Artists/11571/Sarah_Sense_BIO.pdf.
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