Sarah Beth Goncarova

Sarah Beth Goncarova
Born United States
Education University of Maryland School of Architecture
Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts
Known for Sculpture
Painting
Installation
Writing
Movement Contemporary
Feminist art

Sarah Beth Goncarova (born 1980) is an American painter, sculptor, and installation artist known for abstract textile pieces and non-specific figurative scenes. Her works are in several individual, corporate, and public collections.

Early personal life

Sarah Beth Goncarova was born in 1980. Her father was an environmental scientist[1] and her mother, an art teacher.[2] At an early age she studied to play the piano and later reported experiencing chromesthesia, saying "when I would listen to music, I would visualize sinuous colorful shapes in space."[1] She performed with the Alexandria Symphony Orchestra at an early age, with her public debut at age nine.[3] Kim Allen Kluge conducted that debut, and Andre Watts loaned Goncarova his personal piano for the performance.[4] Unfortunately her performances halted when she was 13 due to an accident that severely burned her hand, and also due to severe back pain, joint pain, and a series of personal losses. She took refuge by painting, starting with a mural which ultimately spanned all the walls of her bedroom, transforming it into a "castle courtyard". Photos of this in her application portfolio for undergraduate college helped her earn a full scholarship.

Education

Goncarova graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2002 from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Art in Sculpture and Extended Media, with a minor in Art History. As an undergraduate, she worked as a puppet maker, costumer and scenic designer for the theater, which led her to creating gallery-sized installations.[5] She then matriculated at Maryland School of Architecture where she combined her interests in architecture, stage design, and puppetry in her masters thesis. She received her master's degree in Architecture in 2005, also graduating Magna Cum Laude.

Career

Goncarova continued to paint during her time as a student of architecture. Shortly after graduating, she moved to an apartment whose landlord forbade the use of paint; in response she worked in torn watercolor paper and collage.[6] She also incorporated plaster, fibers, and ink, and devoted herself full-time to these works, with a small exhibition in San Francisco in December 2006,[7] and a solo show in Palo Alto, California in October 2007.[8]

By 2008 she had moved to a less restrictive home studio, and resumed painting in oil at the suggestion of a gallerist.[6] Her first paintings of this period were primarily portraits, landscapes, and still lives. These works featured at Kaleid Gallery (San Jose, California) in October of that year.[9] She then embarked on socially significant series such as The Wake Project in 2009, where seemingly calm landscapes belie underlying disasters.[2] For example, Lighter Fluid depicts a vibrant seascape, where the bright ripples in the water are the result of an oil spill; Once An Orchard appears to be a Wild West desert when it actually depicts a former orchard, abandoned due to drought.[10] Her series Where Ice Meets Sky, also started in 2009, references global warming via scenes of iceberg calving,[10] which she witnessed during a trip to Iceland.[1] These featured in her solo exhibition Lush/Bleak during the summer of 2009,[11] and in the Blue Planet group show at San Francisco's SOMArts Cultural Center Gallery.[12] Sarah Beth Goncarova also began exhibiting in shows with feminist themes during this time, including the Control show juried by Guerrilla Girls West, and Reversing the Gaze: Man As Object.[13]

Goncarova returned to minimalist and purely abstract paintings in her Rainy Season, Dawn, Night Spin and Cosmos series in 2010-2011, which showed at galleries including New Haven's John Slade Ely Center for Contemporary Art. In 2011, her larger than life work “Hunks of Burnin’Love” was selected by the curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for exhibition at the Sanchez Arts Center in Pacifica, California.

In 2012 she created a series of large-scale sculptural installations, working with textiles, called Keeping Time With Needle and Thread. This allowed her to resume sculpting while continuing using feminist themes, referencing cloth, sewing, and needlecraft as "women's work," while avoiding any literalism in pictorial work. These made their public debut at Gallery 195 in New Haven, and have been also exhibited at the Whitney Center, the Kehler-Liddell Gallery, and the A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn. The Hiestand Galleries of Miami University selected the large-scale piece "May–June (2012)" from this series for their Young Sculptors' Exhibition of 2013 as part of her nomination for the prestigious William and Dorothy Yeck Award.[14] In 2013, Goncarova received grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and from the Puffin Foundation for her textile-sculptures.[15]

In January 2013, New York Times art writer Jerry Saltz wrote in a letter to Goncarova that her new textile installations were “brilliant,” likening her sculptures to the work of Louise Bourgeois. He encouraged her to incorporate more dance and “the inner world of women” into her work, which influenced the creation of the performance and video “At My Mother’s Table." Coincidentally, her sculptures drew the attention of Haitian-American dancer and choreographer Nazorine Ulysse, who commissioned several pieces for a dance piece called Zooplankton, which premiered at the Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven in March 2013. The collaboration with Ulysse broadened Goncarova’s range by combining textile sculpture, dance and sound. In the summer of 2013, Goncarova attended a workshop intensive with the internationally renowned dance troupe Pilobolus, which encouraged her to venture more into performance art, and to create works for several dancers using her sculptural work as thematic vehicles.

In August 2013, Goncarova won sponsorship from Artspire, a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts, for the continuation of her series Keeping Time with Needle and Thread, in which she furthers her exploration of the definitions of sculpture, combining needle-crafts, sculpture, sound and performance art.[14]

Writing

Goncarova published the monograph A Yearlong Summer on her work in 2010, writing the book's introduction as well as an essay for each piece.[6]

In 2012 Goncarova co-authored and edited Sonia's Song, Sonia Korn-Grimani's World War II and post-war memoir.[16]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Artist in Focus- Sarah Beth Goncarova". Ugallery. 18 March 2010. Retrieved 27 August 2012.
  2. 1 2 "June Artist: Sarah Beth Goncarova". Pushpin Gallery. 11 June 2010. Retrieved 27 August 2012.
  3. ↑ Roberts, Ed (13 September 1990). "Pianist Short on Years But Long on Confidence". The Washington Post. Retrieved 27 August 2012.
  4. ↑ Cook, Karla (6 September 1990). "Reflections of a young pianist". The Journal.
  5. ↑ Marx, Patricia (16 March 2009). "Made In U.S.A.". New Yorker 85 (5): 68.
  6. 1 2 3 Goncarova, Sarah Beth (2010). A Yearlong Summer. Clay Grouse Press. ISBN 978-0-9845558-0-2.
  7. ↑ "Visual Arts". San Francisco Chronicle. 28 December 2006. Retrieved 3 September 2012.
  8. ↑ Salem, Talia (9 October 2007). "Featured Open Studios Artist". The City Star (San Francisco). p. 6.
  9. ↑ Lakey, Cherri (27 September 2008). "First Friday Oct. 3rd Featured Exhibits at Kaleid". Phantom Galleries. Retrieved 3 September 2012.
  10. 1 2 Goncarova, Sarah Beth (2010). "Forward by Alex Farkas, Curator, Ugallery". A Yearlong Summer. Clay Grouse Press. ISBN 978-0-9845558-0-2.
  11. ↑ "July 1st, 2009 - August 31st, 2009 North of Market/Tenderloin Community Benefit District Corporation". Art Slant. Retrieved 3 September 2012.
  12. ↑ Blue Planet: An Eco-Art Exhibition. Catalog designed and edited by Karen Gutfreund. Juried by Kim Abeles. The Pacific Coast Region Women's Caucus for Art. 2010. ISBN 978-0-578-05959-4.
  13. ↑ CONTROL. Catalog designed by Arabella Decker and Karen Gutfreund. Women's Caucus for Art. 2009. ISBN 978-0-578-03009-8.
    Reversing the Gaze: Man As Object. Tanya Ausburg, Editor. Karen Gutfreund, Exhibition Director. Women's Caucus for Art. 2011. p. 93. ISBN 978-0-9831702-0-4.
  14. 1 2 Dopherty, Donna (1 September 2013). "'May-June' 2013 Young Sculptors Competitor". New Haven Register. p. A4. Retrieved 1 September 2013.
  15. ↑ http://demingfund.org/recent-grantees
  16. ↑ McLoughlin, Pamela (28 May 2012). "Publisher Eyes Personal Perspectives". New Haven Register. p. A1. Retrieved 8 September 2012.

External links


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