Sara Garden Armstrong is a multimedia artist whose decades-long practice embraces a wide range of scales and techniques. Her lyrical, nature-based work interprets life processes and systems, addressing organic change and transformation with elements of decay, chance, and shifts in reality. Often these are expressed through breathing, water, and time.

This Exhibition of drawings, paintings, sculptures, artist books, and large site-specific installations showcases both new and older work. It is the last stop for Armstrong’s traveling exhibition, Threads and Layers, which orientated concurrently with the publication of her monograph of the same title. The Gadsden Museum catalog of the exhibition encapsulates the entirety of the traveling exhibition. Both monographs and catalogs are available at the front desk.

In the main gallery, an early piece from 1979, Environment: Sound/Structure III, invokes the interaction of ritual and personal relationships via the use of color, movement, and sound. The accompanying drawings used to score the sound give insight into the artist’s creative process. On the opposite side of the gallery are sculptural pieces dealing with breathing and life-supporting systems.

Off the main gallery are Littoral Drawings, in which Armstrong has captured a recording of time, as the water’s edge laps the shoreline, a moment never to be repeated. In the adjoining room, the multimedia installation Airplayer XVII consists of sculptural forms, projections, sound, air movement, and shadows painted directly on the wall. The work evokes growth and shifting reality. The remainder of the exhibition consists of flat work and a selection of Armstrong’s artist books. Drawing and painting serve as the foundation of her art practice.

Armstrong received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Alabama and a Master of Art Education from UAB. After living in New York City for 36 years, in 2017 she returned to Birmingham, where she currently lives and works. A past recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation CALL (Creating a Living Legacy) grant through Space One Eleven, Armstrong has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her artist books can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London, and many others.

About the Artist:

Aaryn Lee is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing/mark making, mixed-media, printmaking, installation, projection, time-based media, and performance. Her work tends to be heavily layered, repetitive, somber in mood, and touched with the muted overcast tones from her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Themes investigated in her work, often through a somatic approach, relate to memory, ritual, body dysmorphia, trauma, disordered eating, the psyche, and the female body.

Lou Haney's paintings employ nostalgia to soothe herself and to question the world. Haney has a deep longing for the perceived innocence of the past, especially when reality may feel corrupt and chaotic.

Sharon Shapiro's work contains representations of women, which often agitate the public for a cultural shift. Wrestling with themes of nostalgia, memory, and femininity, Shapiro chronicles the complexities of growing up in the American South.

Cynthia Wagner’s "Finding A Way Home" exhibition is a collection of mixed media pieces taken from different bodies of works. Wagner considers herself a visual narrator telling stories through several artistic mediums. She uses a combination of paint, photography, digital collage, found objects and a variety of other mixed materials.

Her works explore the similarities in the way that both the human brain and computer technology create fictional worlds.

Pamela Venz’s Portraits of Space, Narratives of Place, is a soft look into the artist personal life through photography.

“The photographs contained within this exhibition represent a decade of intentional exploration of the spaces and places that I inhabit. Some are the places that I call home, and some are the places where I have traveled and inhabited for a limited amount of time,” Venz said. “All are the result of my fascination with the ability of the camera to isolate and reveal unintentional narratives and still-lifes. I do not alter the scenes that I photograph or rely on Photoshop tricks for their ambiguous nature.”

Texas artist Shaun Roberts uses a classical style with modern imagery to create narrative paintings that are universally identifiable to the viewer.

“I work in a mythological landscape and develop archetypal images to create a cathartic moment between the viewer and subject whether it be love, death or an eternal sunset,” Roberts said.

Phoebe Burns’ "The Angry Black Women/ A Black Hole In A White Space" is comprised of two separate bodies of work. The Angry Black Woman is a mixed-media exhibit that explores a side of the Black female experience hardly ever told in depth. Burns proclaims that Black women are more than just an angry and loud stereotype. They feel joy, excitement, fear, frustration, and anger. In every art piece, there is a bridge between the past and the present because history constantly repeats itself. The long history of trauma that burdened the Black woman’s ancestors has morphed into new forms of oppression.

A Black Hole in a White Space is a photo series named after modern-day laws that are affecting Black people to this day, asking the question, “What is it like being Black in America?”

Sherrouse's work is intended to help the viewer visualize how consciousness could construct a multidimensional reality.

Joi West’s "Southern Faces" is a project to document and archive 67 stories from members of the LGBTQIA+ community in Alabama. Based on their own experiences and finding out their identity, West said in the project’s artist statement, “Thus the beautiful complexities and intersectionality of our lives and memories build upon these questions: Where are we? Who are we? What does it take for us to find each other?”

"Not So Much A Whisper" is inspired by the ability of women to balance the weight of life’s challenges with dignity, strength, agency and grace. Miles uses a broad spectrum of photographic practices and the confluence of science and art to inform her imagery. She said in her artist statement, “These cyanotype prints on fabric endeavor to remind one of the enigmatic blurring of femininity and the fragility of nature.”

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Finches is a multimedia community project exploring the tension created when we are conflicted about something we love, whether that is a family member, a leader, or a place. “How do I love a thing I know is flawed?” A team of four artists, Melissa Yes, Tyler Jones, Fen Kennedy, and Todd Slaughter invite artists, neighbors, and citizens to navigate this question together. This project takes its name from Atticus Finch, a character in Harper Lee’s novels, To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set A Watchman, and is inspired by the seemingly irreconcilable differences between the two versions of Finch portrayed in these stories.

These works are appropriated from photographs that have been published in the book "Without Sanctuary". Searching through America's past for the last 25 years, collector James Allen uncovered an extraordinary visual legacy: photographs and postcards taken as souvenirs at lynchings throughout America.
The Tuskegee Institute records the lynching of 3,436 blacks between 1882 and 1950. This is probably a tiny percentage of these murders, which were seldom reported, and led to the creation of the NAACP in 1909, an organization dedicated to passing federal anti-lynching laws.

"Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe—don't want to believe—that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago. These photographs bear witness to . . . an American holocaust." — Congressman John Lewis

This work is a commentary about blind leaders and false teachers and the struggle between the wicked and the righteous. I use anthropomorphism of german shepherds, sheep, crocodiles, and lizards to illustrate some of photography's most brutal images, surviving to this day so that we may now look back on the terrorism unleashed on America's African-American community and perhaps know our history and ourselves better.

Anthropomorphism carries many important implications. For example, thinking of a nonhuman entity in human ways renders it worthy of moral care and consideration. In addition, anthropomorphized entities become responsible for their own actions — that is, they become deserving of punishment and reward.

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The other body of work consists of a series of works titled the GOD/DOG Thesis. The GOD/DOG Thesis is a series that originated from the thought that GOD spelled backwards spells DOG. This work is commentary on the false prophets and teachers inside and outside the Church.

Behold, I send forth you like sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves. (Mt 10:16)

Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And as the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into a ditch.
(Mt 15:14)

How terrible it will be for you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs-beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people's bones and all sorts of impurity. You look like upright people outwardly, but your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness. (Mt 23:27-28)

This work was first exhibited at Wiregrass Museum in February 2020 right before the pandemic hit the world by storm. And considering themes of women and water, I thought about Odysseus and the sirens. I began to wonder what happened to them after Odysseus passed by surviving their deadly song. It is said that the sirens so distraught with losing their allure threw themselves in the ocean and drowned. I envisioned them on the ocean floor eating hotdogs.

In my practice, there is the installation itself, the sculptural, photographic space and then there is the live performance. Both of these forms contribute to generating still and moving images. Four years later, I’m looking back on the documentation, not with the eyes of intent but with the eyes of impact. Here’s me wading through the archive of documentation - looking at what was created to understand what the project has become and what’s next.