The Shape Of Things To Come

Since her breakthrough at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Sarah Crowner’s bold, color-saturated work has been blurring the lines between art and craft.

- Dodie Kazanjian

All I ever wanted to do was make a painting that you could immerse yourself in,” Sarah Crowner tells me. We’re in her studio, in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. It’s early October, and the space is full of designs and props for Garden Blue, Jessica Lang’s new ballet for the American Ballet Theatre, which opens in a couple of weeks with set and costumes by Crowner. She’s just back from Pittsburgh, where two new works of hers—a 23-by-18-foot canvas and a 64-foot-long wall of handmade tiles—are appearing in the Carnegie International. In a few weeks, she’s off to Veracruz, Mexico, to christen the swimming pool she’s designed for an artists’ residency there. The pool, “two wave shapes put together but skewed,” as she says, was her response to a request for a sculpture in the landscape. “I thought, What do artists want to do after they work?” It’s a striking, mostly blue tile basin, the deck paved with pinkish, unglazed Mexican terra-cotta—hard to imagine a more immersive work of art.