Contact:
sarahnw [att] gmail {DOT} com
download artist CV
academic CV available upon request
Bio:
Sarah Nelson Wright is a Brooklyn based artist, writer and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. She creates interdisciplinary media projects and public art about the urban experience that explore the changing city and investigate avenues for intervention. Her work encompasses video, installation, interactive sculpture, and poetic design.
Wright’s projects include BROOKLYN MAKES (2009) – a site-specific video installation about manufacturing in Northern Brooklyn, and LOCATIONS & DISLOCATION (2008-present) – a project about displacement in the urban environment. She has exhibited in diverse New York venues, including CONFLUX, The Center, PowerHouse ArtSpace and Bring To Light, as well as in Mostra de Artes in San Paulo, Brazil, and ACVic in Vic, Spain. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts. She has received grants from Brooklyn Arts Council, North Brooklyn Public Arts Coalition, Brooklyn Community Foundation and FEAST Brooklyn.
Wright holds a BA in American Studies from Yale and an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College. She teaches at Hunter College and NYU Polytechnic.
Artist Statement:
I have always been fascinated by the way ideas translate into the lived world. That is, how our understanding of the way things work shapes the ways we interact; how our experiences reinforce or interrupt our beliefs; and how we form our values and identities within a larger cultural context.
As an artist and writer making interdisciplinary media projects, I seek to engage with social and political issues at the point where they intimately affect everyday life. The goal of my work is to create platforms for investigation and to open spaces for reconsideration of naturalized values and systems. I believe this exploration is integral to the process of collective re-imagination needed to unlock new possibilities for how we live and how we represent and understand ourselves and the communities and systems in which we participate.
My projects share three common themes: creativity as a method for investigation, conversation as the primary source material, and local community as the laboratory for understanding the world and ourselves. I seek to create work that is both poetic and experiential and, in some small way, offers an opportunity to recognize our values and our world as constructed and malleable, but still complex and meaningful to our daily lives. It is in this recognition that I see the possibility for change.
