Sarah Conarro - Work Samples
#1
Title: Come Say Hey
Size: Installation - size variable
Media: Social Engagement, Letterpress, and Drawing
Date: 2015
“Come Say Hey” is an interactive project explores “advice” as a place-based phenomenon with overarching themes that transcend location. Conarro, a personable and chatty advice collector, casually interacts with passersby who approach the stand and eventually asks them to write a piece of advice on a 4" x 6" piece of paper and clip it to the stand. Sifting through the advice (which also always includes opinions and demands), shows there are many links in every participants thoughts. Bron from the change to use a letterpress in Juneau Alaska in 2011, Conarro, built an advice stand to collect advice on a roadtrip with her two young children. In 2015, Brooklyn Bridge Park requested Conarro to run the stand for their Public Installation series. Following these interactions, Conarro has dreamt of doing a rendition of localized advice to grow a digital database showing how advice connects us, transcending location.
#2
Title: Exchange Rate with Laura Rivera-Ayala
Size: 18" x 18" x 6"
Media: Four-channel Interactive sculpture (paint, wood, sound)
Date: 2023
Exchange Rate with Laura Rivera-Ayala is a record of intercultural learning and reciprocity between the artist, serving as a witness bringing an outsider’s gaze, and the curator of New Devotions, Puerto Rican native, Laura Rivera-Ayala. The artist and curator, long-time friends, texted back and forth for months as Rivera-Ayala was developing the New Devotions show, which naturally led to the artist intermittently asking questions about the show’s development and themes. The artist cut-and-pasted the off-the-cuff text messages to create a ‘formal interview’, resulting in an intimate peek into the curator’s personal narrative as it relates to the themes of the show. The result provides an approachable and accessible entry point for the artist and other outsiders to better learn and understand the personal, place-based knowledge presented by the Puerto Rican artists in the show. As a four-channel, interactive audio installation, questions and answers overlap, loop, and repeat, imitating the nature of casual conversation and what it feels like to learn something new that you know nothing about. *shown in New Devotions at The Clemente in NY 2023
#3
Title: Intermission:
Size: Installation - size variable
Media: Social Engagement
Date: 2024
Intermission: is a four-course dinner evening event for femme-identifying individuals to connect with strangers and deepen connections with friends and acquaintances. The goals of the event are connection, relaxation, and nourishing the mind and the body. The evening begins with cocktails while Conarro compiles a collection of photos of each guests’ hand to document the presence and integral participation of each guest. During dinner, guests are invited to take hand-written, inconsequential questions from bowls around the table as entry points of dialogue. For every new course, Conarro presents a new seating arrangement. Guests change their seats and are surrounded by new people, new cuisine, and new circumstances. As they leave, guests are given a printed original work of two hands in a gesture of offering created by Conarro for the event.
Intermission: wants to take away the reasons why gathering as women is so challenging. All women face different obstacles that keep them from gathering and building community, leaving few opportunities for multigenerational exchange. This project aims to create an intermission from these constraints. Within the project, Conarro invites one or more women to co-host with her, ensuring that no single person knows everyone attending, including herself. The common thread connecting all attendees is their shared gender-identity and experiences therein.
#4
Title: 54 5x7s (in progress)
Size: 54 @ 5” x 7”
Media: Collage, Acrylic, Graphite
Date: Ongoing
54 5x7 is a series of 18 triptychs comprised of 3 works on 5” x 7” paper paired with personal photographs of Conarro’s daughter, Margot. Created on-the-go over a 15 year period, the three components of each triptych are one collage, one object drawing, and one fill-in-the blank exercise. The collage is abstract and colorful, created to reflect the myriad emotions that we carry in our relationships with others and ourselves. The object drawing serves as a subjective glue, connecting the abstract collage on the left with the text on the right. The fill-in-the-blank exercise consists of a sentence repeated multiple times. Each time the sentence is repeated, a word is replaced by a blank space. By the final iteration of the sentence, almost all words have been replaced by blank spaces.
The pieces were created in cars, houses, trains, buses, and apartments, allowing Conarro to actually get to work on the project since being ‘in the studio’ has not often been a reality. Because the pieces travelled with Conarro everywhere she and Margot went for 12 years, they reflect Conarro’s personal story - every high and low - through two child births, loves found then lost, and multiple moves including across the country from Alaska to New York City. Sometimes this weight felt too heavy, leading Conarro to almost discard all of 5x7s in a truckstop trash can in rural Pennsylvania. The pieces persisted, however, like strong memories one cannot shake.
#5
Title: Link-Link Club Lecture Series
Size: N/A
Media: Social Engagement
Date: 2015-current
Link-Link Club (www.link-link.club) is a community-building lecture series inviting people to become lecturers on any topic outside of their core field of expertise. Link-Link Club encourages talks about anything else - obsessions, off-the-cuff curiosities, personal anecdotes, amateur ‘research’, guilty pleasures, Wikipedia wormhole findings… Painters talk macro-economics. Techies talk royal family gossip. Carpenters talk their favorite poet. After the lecture, everyone mingles and chats over pizza. Since the project’s inception in 2015, Conarro has curated 160 lectures (and counting). Her collaborator, Julian Bozeman, runs producation for every lecture meaning that within project (which is entering its ninth year), the duo has successfully archived hours of community members sharing what they are thinking about that is outside of the regular question, “What do you do for work?”
Conarro is the proud recipient of the One More Hour grant in 2024, a grant focused on in-real-life connection in the face of the loneliness epidemic in the United States.
#6
Title: Our Breasts, Our Stories: Beyond Mastectomy
Size: 8 x 10
Media: phototransfer
Date: 2025
Devised by Alaskan writer, mother, and double cancer survivor (breast cancer and ocular melanoma), Rebecca Braun believes in the power of stories to connect us, push us, and help us heal. Within her own experience with breast cancer, Braun reached out to Conarro to collaborate in making a visual portrait to pair with Braun’s writing “Beyond Mastectomy.” Within their text exchange of trying to decide how to best depict Braun’s very personal experience, Braun chose to snap a shirtless selfie and send it to Conarro. Through phototransfer, Conarro worked to produce versions of Braun that are honest and beautiful - first for Braun herself, and second for the upcoming process of inviting women who have experienced breast cancer to join this project.
From Braun:: Thousands of women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year. We are faced with big decisions about our health and our bodies, often with little time, little information, and very little opportunity to learn from others who have traveled this path. Our Breasts, Our Stories aims to capture the voices of women impacted by breast cancer and surgical intervention, and to share our stories about our decisions, our experiences, our bodies, and our feelings. These stories will accompany artistically rendered images intended to help normalize and find beauty in our changed bodies and showcased at a public gallery in Juneau, Alaska in fall of 2025. By sharing stories and images, we can help each other better understand our options, identify and communicate our priorities, and find acceptance. I hope this project helps those facing breast cancer feel less alone in what can be an alienating experience.
#7
Title: Quanemciput Piliialput-llu (Prologue)
Size: N/A
Media: Audio, Video
Date: 2011
Conarro collaborated in an interdisciplinary performance project featuring students from nine villages in the Lower Kuskokiwm district celebrating Alaska's 50th year as a state. Conarro lead visual design including preliminary work painting/collaging a 160 sq. ft. painting with 100 K-12 students in Kasigluk, Alaska. Kasigluk is a 550-person Yupik Alaska Native community accessible by plane, snow machine or boat. This painting in was flown into Bethel, Alaska to act as the backdrop for the production Quanemciput Piliialput-llu : Our Stories and The Things We Made and then returned to Kasigluk to be permanently installed in Akiuk School's lobby. As a component of the project, Conarro worked with high school students to make phototransfer portraits of elders in the community who were interviewed as a part of the production piece. Conarro also worked with students on the the prologue video of the production by incorporating storyknifing to reflect the history of Yup’ik traditional storytelling. Collaborators for this project include Qacung Blanchett, Ryan Conarro, and Katie Basile. This project received funding from the Alaska Humanities Forum, the Rasmuson Foundation, and the Alaska State Council on the Arts.
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#8
Title: Glitters
Size: Installation - size variable
Media: Sound, Time Lapse Video, Acrylic, Glitter
Date: 2012
Glitters is a three-part project combining community engagement with public art-making executed in collaboration with KTOO Public Radio Station in Alaska's capital city of Juneau. For parts one and two, Conarro created an immersive installation at the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council (JAHC) with suspended mesh partitions, false doors, and narrow tunnels. Part one was a daytime family-friendly event wherein attendees of all ages applied paint and glitter to multiple 6’ diameter circular sculptures. Simultaneously, Tlingit Alaskan percussionist Ed Littlefield circled the space in a three-hour endurance performance, creating rhythms on found instruments. Part two took place that night within the installation. Local music acts performed on an in-the-round stage constructed by Conarro. Attendees wove their way past the newly created circular sculptures and through doorways, tunnels and paths to get to the stage area in the center of the venue. Part three involved installing the circular sculptures on the exterior facade of the KTOO Radio Station, where they remained (and became degraded by the elements) for a month.
The JAHC is a staple of community gatherings in Juneau, and KTOO is a staple of South East Alaska’s airways. Conarro sought to transform these familiar locations, creating an immersive installation in the former and a public art piece on the facade of the latter. A cross-section of the population—some of whom were coming for a family event, some of whom were coming for a late evening of music, and a few of whom were coming to participate in a large-scale collaborative artwork—interfaced on the same project. Creating accessible, exciting, and fun entry-points for these different cross-sections was integral to the inclusive nature of the piece. The installation of the circular sculptures on the facade of the radio station (viewable from the only main road through the city) gave access to those who otherwise would have no involvement with the project at all, paralleling the inclusive nature of not only the JAHC but of public radio itself. The use of circles is symbolic of the non-hierarchical element of Conarro’s artistic practice.
#9
Title: Line in Surround Sound, Surrounded in Line
Size: Installation - size variable
Media: Ink, Acrylic, Sound, Immersive Projections
Date: 2024
Our movement and our stillness determine the rhythm of our experience. For this audience-activated piece, participants collaborate on analogue gestural line drawings while audio recorders capture and playback sounds of their mark making. Guided by a series of prompts, participants drag their drawings through a multi-camera mutli-projector rig surrounding the room in lines and sounds in a soothing immersive environment.
*made in collaboration with Julian Bozeman
*curated by Alva CalyMayor for Autonomous Line Society / Drawing Lab at Spring Break Art At Show
#10
Title: New World Over (at Silent Barn)
Size: Installation - size variable
Media: Sculpture, Collage, Projections
Date: 2017
New World Over is a projection-mapped installation featuring line drawings of “the universe” on a series of triangles paired interspersed with circle-shaped mirrors. Commissioned by Silent Barn, New World Over is designed to meet the request of giving off an “apocalyptic kind of hopeful” vibe to set the stage for performances from musicians and djs in the queer underground scene.
*made in collaboration with Julian Bozeman
